The home of the Common Roman Pontiff Data Repository, curated by the Catholic Engineering Task Force of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation.
The Common Roman Pontiff Data Repository (CRPDR) provides a canonicalized list of identifiers for the Roman Pontiffs, from Saint Peter to the reigning pope — 265 persons across 267 pontificates, seeded from the Holy See's own reference table of Roman Pontiffs.
Canonical papal identifiers are needed wherever Catholic data must reference a pope unambiguously:
- magisterial document attribution — encyclicals, apostolic constitutions,
and decrees are cited by their issuing pontiff (the
cdcf-uri-scheme already
builds
cdcf:magisterium/pope-leo-xiii/rerum-novarum-style URIs on papal slugs; CRPDR provides the maintained registry behind them); - liturgical calendar data, as served by the Liturgical Calendar API (papal feasts, canonizations, calendar reforms);
- Roman Martyrology cross-references (CRMEDR): many eulogies commemorate popes;
- episcopal succession data, church-history datasets, and any application that must say which pope it means.
rp:<name>-<roman-ordinal> e.g. rp:leo-xiv, rp:john-paul-ii
rp:peter (sole exception: Peter bears no ordinal)
Every identifier carries its ordinal — including sole holders of a name
(rp:francis-i, rp:lando-i) — so that IDs never shift when a future pope
reuses a name: the label "Pope Francis" may one day become "Pope Francis I",
but the identifier is immutable. Identity belongs to the person, not the
pontificate: Benedict IX, who reigned three separate times, is one
rp:benedict-ix with three pontificate records. The full proposal — grammar,
date handling, the Peter exception, antipopes, and the open questions — is in
docs/schema-proposal.md. All IDs are drafts
pending committee review.
data/pontiffs.json— the seed registry: 265 person records covering all 267 pontificates, each with its draft canonical ID, regnal name and ordinal, aliases, secular name, birthplace with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of its modern country, dated pontificates (source strings verbatim plus parsed dates where unambiguous), and itscdcf:person/cross-reference.registry/pontiffs.md— the same registry as a human-readable table, one row per pontificate in succession order.docs/schema-proposal.md— the proposed schema and the open questions for the committee.data/source/— the committed snapshot of the Holy See's table (provenance in its README); the generator parses this snapshot, never the live site.scripts/generate_seed.py— regenerates the seed (python3 scripts/generate_seed.py); tests:python3 -m unittest discover -s scripts.
The seed derives from the Holy See's reference table of Roman Pontiffs (vatican.va). The registry records the succession as the Holy See presents it; it takes no position on disputed historical questions.