In the world of Catholic prayer apps, it seems like there is just about something for everyone.
From prayer to Scripture study to the rosary to inspiration and connecting with God, dozens of apps exist and more are likely on the way.
Most of the apps are available for use in Apple and Android formats, but some are built for either one platform or the other. Users will have to visit the appropriate download site to specifically determine which apps will work on their respective smartphone or tablet.
Catholic News Service has taken a brief look at a baker's dozen of widely used apps and summarizes them in this listing. Most are available in multiple languages, including Spanish.
Because of the large number of apps available this listing is not meant to be all-inclusive.
-- Catholic Study Bible: Includes access to the entire Bible with additional related content from Ignatius Press and the Augustine Institute. Annotated material developed by well-known theologians guides the user through Scripture passages. There also is a dramatized audio version of the Gospel of John among other features.
-- Click to Pray: The official app of the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network. It offers an intention from Pope Francis to pray for during the day. Tips are included to encourage prayer throughout the day, in community and in schools. A section allows users to post a personal prayer intention which other users can join.
-- Confession: An app that helps the user with an examination of conscience and a step-by step guide to the sacrament of reconciliation. It also can be used while receiving the sacrament in the confessional or privately with a priest. To protect privacy, the app does not require registration, a username, passwords or online storage.
-- Daily Readings: A tool built around access to the daily Mass readings for a given year. Feast days and other liturgical celebrations are noted. A guide lists the books of the Bible. It also is available for use even when offline.
-- Hallow: The app is built to help users become more closely connected with God through thousands of audio-guided meditations and prayers led by prominent theologians and clerics. Routines for prayer at various times of the day allow for users to choose the time that's best for them to pray. A feature allows for connection with family members and friends.
-- iBreviary: Users can pray the Liturgy of the Hours and read the Scripture from daily Mass. It includes other Catholic prayers for various settings, such as distributing Communion to the sick, as well as traditional rites.
-- iMissal: Includes the full liturgical calendar users can click on any date and be taken directly to the day's Mass readings. Other features include a daily Bible passage for reflection, the ability to share verses via social media, and save favorite verses for later reference. A large selection of Catholic prayers is part of the app.
-- iPieta: Content reaches across liturgical, catechetical and spiritual resources. Users can access a saint of the day feature, daily devotions, traditional prayers, papal encyclicals, Second Vatican Council documents, and the writing of St. John of the Cross, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Louis Marie de Montfort and St. Teresa of Jesus.
-- Laudate: A single-source app that offers the daily Mass readings, the Liturgy of the Hours and a large selection of prayers. It includes a section for favorite personal prayers and links to Vatican documents, saint of the day, praying the rosary and confession preparation.
-- Magnificat: The companion app to the widely read Magnificat magazine that provides the prayers and readings of daily Mass. Other daily prayers are rooted in the Liturgy of the Hours. Offerings include meditations based on the writings of Catholic theologians of the past and contemporary times and essays on the lives of saints.
-- Mass Explained: Through multimedia tools, the app does exactly what its title says. Slideshows, videos, maps, 3D images and other communication tools explore the origins of each part of the ordinary Mass and the prayers and rituals practiced throughout the liturgy. Developers say it is based on authentic Catholic teaching.
-- Pray As You Go: Developed by the Jesuits in England, the app provides one practical prayer session daily of about 10 minutes or so in length. It mixes music with the day's Gospel reading, prayer and a reflection rooted in Ignatian spirituality. Users are invited to consider moments throughout the day when God's presence can be found.
-- Verbum Catholic Bible Study: Provides access to the entire Revised Standard Version Catholic Bible as well as the Catholic catechism, the Lectionary, Vatican documents and several other resources for mobile study. Users can link to Bible study plans to help determine which sections of the Bible to explore and pray about.
In addition to these apps, numerous others are designed to guide users in praying the rosary. Each has different features to offer the traditional prayers as well as images and audio tools that can make praying the rosary more meaningful. Some are quite elaborate with many different features to supplement prayer while others are more basic.
Among the most widely downloaded such apps are: The Holy Rosary, iRosary, Mary app, Rosary Plus RD, Rosary Pro, Touch Rosary and Virtual Rosary.
— Dennis Sadowski, Catholic News Service
Prayer apps are popular, but users cautioned to review privacy policies
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the digital world, smartphone users can find apps for just about any purpose: banking, news and information, entertainment, travel, finding a job, self-improvement and, of course, prayer.
That includes Catholic prayer.
Dozens of Catholic-specific apps exist. They have varying levels of presentation and content.
Styles range from a basic offering of prayer or Scripture to those that combine inspirational music or traditional chants with pleasant graphics to help guide users through the daily Mass readings, the rosary, meditation, the Liturgy of the Hours, prayers for the Lenten season and even step-by-step preparations for the sacrament of reconciliation.
Beyond devotional features, some apps have been built to allow users to post prayers or prayer requests, comment on a particular challenge they are facing, or invite others to offer support at a troubling time.
Whatever their design, prayer apps have become a popular option for millions of Catholics worldwide seeking to better connect with God and establish a stronger prayer life.
"The things we've heard from folks ... is just that it is a place of peace amidst what is a relatively crazy world, both politically and the pandemic that obviously brought with it incredible suffering and grief," Alex Jones, CEO and co-founder of Hallow, said of his popular Catholic app.
Since its launch in December 2018, Hallow had seen more than 2 million downloads as of March 1, Jones, a University of Notre Dame graduate, told Catholic News Service.
He credits the app's widening popularity to content that is regularly updated and expanded and speaks to people's needs. The app offers a free version with more than 3,000 meditations, as well as a premium version, Hallow Plus, with more expansive content for a monthly or annual subscription fee.
While Hallow enjoys enormous popularity, other apps have garnered their own devoted followers as well, with some people using more than one prayer app in their lives.
Jennifer Kane, who catalogs and evaluates Catholic apps at her website CatholicAPPtitude.com, told CNS she has found several excellent resources among the hundreds she has downloaded. Her website, which went live in 2013, has evaluations for apps such as Laudate, Click to Pray, Pray as You Go, Mass Explained, Divine Office and Universalis. Her site includes those that are free and those that require a fee or subscription.
Prayer apps are not just for Catholics. Christian prayer and meditation apps are burgeoning as well, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020. Among the most widely downloaded are London-based Glorify, founded in 2019, and Los Angeles-based Pray.com, founded in 2016.
Like Hallow, the Glorify and Pray.com apps offer free basic access as well as enhanced versions for monthly and annual subscriptions.
The growing popularity of prayer apps has attracted attention from investors.
Hallow, Pray and Glorify alone have raised more than $120 million from investors.
For example, in 2021 Hallow raised more than $50 million. Jones said pitching the app to potential backers was difficult, but that the funding has allowed the 40-person company to continue to expand its offerings in the hope of eventually turning a profit.
Hallow's investors include venture capitalist and political activist Peter Thiel; Scott Malpass, co-founder and board chair of Catholic Investment Services and retired chief investment officer at the University of Notre Dame; Narya VC, a venture capital firm owned by J.D. Vance, author of "Hillbilly Elegy" and a candidate for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Ohio; and a handful of other venture capital firms.
Meanwhile, Glorify, announced in December it had raised $40 million. Since its founding, Pray.com has raised $34 million in five funding rounds, according to Crunchbase.com.
Such large investments have led to questions about how the apps -- like most other apps and online services -- use the personal data collected from users and whether such information is being monetized.
Writing in an op-ed in The Washington Post in May 2020, venture capitalist Katherine Boyle said the pandemic especially contributed to the popularity of prayer apps and high-tech investors noticed.
"A holy trinity is in place: isolated people hungry for attachment, religions desperate for growth in an online world and technology investors searching for the consumer niches yet to digitize," Boyle wrote.
Such circumstances have led to questions about the actions of some prayer app developers as they try to generate greater revenues outside of subscription fees.
In January, BuzzFeed reported on the experience of a Pray.com user who said she did not realize the comments she expressed regarding a personal trauma were being mined to match her personal actions in the app to other details about her that were purchased from data brokers.
Pray.com's policy explains that the company collects data including a user's physical location, the links they follow and the text of posts. Such information is supplemented with information from "third-parties such as data analytics providers and data brokers" and can include "your gender, age, religious affiliation, ethnicity, marital status, household size and income, political party affiliation and interests ... geographic location and personal information."
The company, the policy explains, shares users' personal information including the specific devices they use, with "third-parties" for "commercial purposes."
The policy specifically states, "If you do not agree to the terms of this privacy policy, please do not use this service."
Pray.com did not respond to CNS requests for comment.
Media observers at two Catholic institutions said steps to sell or monetize personal data by any app developer pose ethical and moral questions. They cautioned users to carefully think about what they post, especially on free apps.
Florence Chee, program director at the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy at Loyola University Chicago, told CNS that requiring users to enable certain smart device settings before an app can be used amounts to "coerced interactions."
"The user has very little power, very little awareness in determining where their data goes and how long that data is used for what purposes down the line," Chee said.
While gathering and sharing personal data is legal under current regulations, Chee questioned whether companies should be doing so. She compared prayers or reflections that a user may post on an app to being in the confessional with a priest, saying she believed they should remain private.
"Just because it's legal to collect data about people doing prayer apps doesn't mean you should. It is more nebulous, but this is what differentiates law and ethics. This is where more folks need to be advocating for a more ethical framing of apps for prayer services as an example," she said.
Kirsten Martin, director of the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center at the University of Notre Dame, expressed concern for apps based on "this idea of selling a point of vulnerability to others that don't have our interest in mind."
"(Apps) are selling that fact that I'm vulnerable and even the content of what I'm vulnerable about, which seems like a double strike," Martin told CNS.
Kane at CatholicAPPtitude said she has evaluated dozens of apps since 2013, looking at ease of use and the content of each including those where users can upload personal thoughts and prayers. She has seen apps with very direct privacy policies that explain whether personal information will be shared to third-party data brokers.
"Marketing is very sophisticated. So most of the time your (information) is going to get targeted and it's going to get to other entities," Kane said in reference to any online site or phone app.
"Security is an ethereal thing," she added. "If we can approach it that way, don't put anything out there that you don't want people to find out."
At Hallow, an updated privacy policy took effect March 28. It specifically states that "we do not sell, rent, or otherwise provide users' personal data to any data brokers. Any "private sensitive personal data," such as journal entries or reflections generated by users, is encrypted and only accessible to the user, the policy states. Similarly, such data is not shared with "any advertising partners," it says.
"We never sell data or send to data brokers or any of that stuff," Jones told CNS, explaining that the company has "always tried to be as transparent as possible" to maintain the trust of users.
"I think privacy ... is an incredibly important thing across industries, especially when you're talking about something as intimate and personal as someone's faith experience, which oftentimes they're inviting God and using the Hallow app to deal with grief or suffering or anything that could be sensitive," Jones said.
In a March 29 email response to questions, a Glorify representative told CNS the app does not sell or otherwise share personal information of users outside of the company. Glorify officials are working to update the privacy policy "to make it simpler and easier to understand" and users will be notified by email when it is posted, the representative said.
The message also said the app, with 2.7 million downloads, is seeing its return on investment through the subscription fees it charges for premium content.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, has long promoted privacy for users of any type of app, prayer or otherwise.
Bennett Cyphers, staff technologist at the foundation, said efforts have been underway for years to protect the online privacy of app users specifically and computer users generally but that they have achieved limited success.
"There's a real lobbying push from the companies to water down any potential privacy laws or kill any laws that would threaten their business model," Cyphers said.
"We don't think that the bargain that users implicitly agree to when they download a free app -- which is you get to use this free app and in exchange your data is collected and exploited and shared and sold without your consent, frequently without your knowledge -- is fair or ethical at all," he continued.
"The majority of people hate this," he added, "but it continues because it is so opaque. It's so difficult for people to track what's going on and frequently to even figure out what's going on the because the laws we have that require companies to tell you what they're actually doing are frequently really inadequate."
— Dennis Sadowski, Catholic News Service
While there were prayer apps, apologetics resources and “theology nerd” podcasts, “we didn’t see a Catholic podcast that was more outward looking,” said McKinless, an executive editor at America Media.
“We wanted to create a space where there could be conversations about topics in the Church that are contested in the modern world and to not be afraid of bringing on people who weren’t 100% certain in their faith or 100% in the Church or were struggling with questions of Catholic teaching and their relationship to God and what it means to be a Catholic in the world today,” McKinless said.
Zac Davis and Ashley McKinless, co-hosts of the podcast Jesuitical from America Media, are pictured with Sebastian Gomes, the show’s producer, March 15. Davis is an associate editor and director for audience engagement and analytics at America. McKinless and Gomes are executive editors at America. (CNS| Keara Hanlon, courtesy America Media)
Building a space of encounter with a diversity of viewpoints, not simply Catholic ones, is a point of pride for McKinless these past five years. “We’ve made it a point to talk to Muslims, Jewish people, atheists, spiritual seekers,” she said. That’s a unique contribution to Catholic media, she added.
Another factor that contributed to Jesuitical’s initial success was narrowly defining its target audience.
Listeners could be young people who had recently graduated or finished a year of service work. Perhaps they had been involved in campus ministry, theology or youth group and are now living in a new city, where they are struggling to fit into parish life or Catholic life and “don’t feel like they have an outlet to talk about these things,” Davis said.
“We wanted to create a space to invite people in where we weren’t assuming that they didn’t know anything about the Church or that they had questions about the Church,” he told CNS. But “they just wanted to hang out and learn some new things, talk about spirituality in an inviting way. I think we’ve hit that market,” he said.
Today, the podcast has reached beyond that audience and attracts older listeners who want to know what young people “actually think” outside of formal Church settings, added Davis, who is an associate editor and director for audience engagement and analytics at America Media.
For listeners, no matter their age, the draw to the podcast is the Ignatian spirituality the show strives to cultivate.
The last segment in the podcast, called “As One Friend Speaks to Another,” is the faith-sharing part in the show where the co-hosts talk about where they’ve found God during the week.
“I’ve heard Jesuits come up and tell us, ‘You guys are modeling Ignatian spirituality in an entirely new way,’ which is great to hear because Ashley and I will be the first to admit we’re not experts in it. We’re not Jesuits. We’ve not done the Spiritual Exercises (of St. Ignatius Loyola). We are just trying to use this tradition in a modern, contemporary context,” Davis said.
Apart from their faith-sharing segment, Davis and McKinless said they way they select guests and examine news brings a Jesuit perspective to the show.
“Keeping our eyes wide open, reviewing (the news) the way the Examen reviews every day the lights and the shadows and trying to take that same approach to how you look at Catholic news is something we keep in mind,” Davis said.
Their innate curiosity about the world informs how they choose what news to cover and whom to interview.
“There’s really not a corner of the Church or culture or politics that we don’t think there’s a way in for us for and a way for us to find God working through God’s people in those spaces,” McKinless said.
Embracing Ignatian spirituality also means meeting people where they are. “We’re not going to wait until someone’s 100% on board with everything the Church teaches before we’re going to be willing to talk to them and have that encounter,” she added.
For Davis, one of the best parts about Jesuitical is the community that’s formed online through their Facebook group. “They’re people who are kindred spirits who found each other and help each other” and interact without any prodding, he said.
Podcasts are uniquely suited to building virtual community, McKinless said. And the two wanted to deepen that through a Facebook group, which now has more than 4,800 members. “It’s a very organic community. It runs itself and people are respective and constructive and charitable,” McKinless said.
Davis believes that the U.S. Church is experiencing an “upheaval of what Catholic life looks like.” While the focus in the past has been on the parish, young Catholics today are looking outside of the parish to find community.
“To be able to play a small part as we’re figuring it out in real time has meant a lot to me,” Davis said.
Jesuitical also has a group of 165 Patreon supporters, listeners who pay a minimum of $5 monthly to access exclusive episodes, private posts from the co-hosts, access to virtual reading groups and other benefits.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, McKinless and Davis hosted a Zoom reading group over four weeks discussing Pope Francis’ encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” for their
Patreon community, and hope to do more reading groups in the future.
Throughout the five years of the podcast, the show has gone through a few transitions. One of the founding co-hosts, Olga Segura, now works for National Catholic Reporter, and the show has a new producer, Sebastian Gomes, who also is an executive editor at America.
The changes have “forced us to keep the show fresh and ever-evolving” because “it is such a group effort that each personality does really shape the podcast,” McKinless said.
McKinless, 31, and Davis, 29, also are aware that their tagline is “young, hip and lay.”
“We’re getting less young and maybe less hip, so we’re thinking about what the next five years could look like when we’re solidly in our 30s,” McKinless said.
Both co-hosts are eager to get back on the road and resume live shows after two years of travel restrictions due to the pandemic.
And McKinless mentioned another hope for the next five years: Interview more U.S. bishops.
Jesuitical hosts have talked to Bishop Frank J. Caggiano of Bridgeport, Conn.; Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert E. Barron; and Seattle Auxiliary Bishop Eusebio Elizondo.
The goal is to “bring bishops down to earth for people” and “give bishops the opportunity to show their full humanity” to the Church, while modeling what a listening Church can be by having conversations with them, McKinless said.
Davis and McKinless shared advice for other Catholic journalists who want to build an online community: Pay attention to emerging forms media forms, narrowly define your audience, and consider the type of space you’re creating.
If young people “think it’s going to be a place of judgment, they don’t need anymore of that. They want places where they’re safe to ask questions, they’re safe to disagree, where they feel like their concerns are being heard,” McKinless said.
— Anna Capizzi Galvez, Catholic News Service