A beautiful companion for the Catholic life of prayer — helping souls grow in holiness, one day at a time.
We need your help! We're preserving and translating the Catholic literary tradition — spiritual classics, Church Fathers, liturgical texts — and making it all free and open. You can help by sponsoring the project, contributing translations, or even running our AI-assisted pipeline with your own tokens. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get involved.
Ember is a free, open-source Catholic prayer app that meets you where you are — from first steps in prayer to deep devotion — and walks with you daily.
Available on iOS, Android, and the web.
The heart of Ember. Build a structured daily rhythm of prayer — a Plan of Life — and track your fidelity over time. Morning Offering, Rosary, Angelus, Divine Office, Mass, Lectio Divina, Examination of Conscience... an open content corpus covers the breadth of Catholic devotional life, with offline pinning for the practices and books you keep close.
Ember is also a platform for the Catholic literary tradition — spiritual classics, Church Fathers, formation guides, liturgical texts, hagiographies — translated into multiple languages, structured in open formats, and freely available for anyone to use, extend, and build upon. Authors in the corpus already include St. Alphonsus Liguori and St. Louis de Montfort, with many more to come.
The fruits of Catholic tradition should be freely available to all. No one should own what belongs to the Church and to humanity. This translation work is ongoing and needs support — if you believe in preserving Catholic heritage in the open, consider sponsoring the project.
Practices are defined in pure JSON — no app code needed. A flexible flow DSL with primitives like select, repeat, cycle, and proper can describe anything from a three-line Guardian Angel prayer to a 33-day consecration program to the complete Mass with daily EF/OF propers. Adding a new practice means writing content files, not code.
All content is open and lives in this repo as plain JSON and Markdown — practices, prayers, books, and collections. Anyone can contribute their own prayer traditions by opening a pull request; the next deploy hashes the new content into the Hearth corpus and ships it to every user.
An illuminated manuscript aesthetic — ornamental dividers, gold accents, curated serif typography — because prayer deserves beauty. Collectible holy cards earned through sustained practice carry real hagiographic content — not trophies, but introductions to holy lives that inspire your own. Liturgical seasons shape the app's mood with seasonal theming and daily saint commemorations.
 Our Lady of Fatima |
 St. Michael |
 St. Joseph |
 St. Therese of Lisieux |
 St. Peter |
 St. Moses the Black |
- Plan of Life — tier-based daily checklist, multi-hue fidelity wall, streaks, time blocks, notifications
- Content Corpus — content-addressed Hearth corpus of practices, prayers, books, and chapters; opened directly in
/browse, pinned for offline use - Flow Engine — a flexible DSL that describes any prayer from a simple devotion to the Mass
- Bible Reader — Douay-Rheims, Catholic Public Domain Version, Knox, Matos Soares and Clementine Vulgate in the corpus; Ave Maria read from its publisher
- Catechism Reader — full CCC (2,865 paragraphs) with 5-level collapsible TOC
- Mass (Ordo Missae) — complete ordinary (OF + EF), daily EF propers, OF propers (PT-BR complete, EN readings)
- Book Reader — long-form prose with CSS column pagination
- Liturgical Calendar — OF + EF seasons, 347-entry sanctoral cycle, seasonal theming
- Multilingual — English + Brazilian Portuguese
- Offline-first — everything works on the device, with no account needed
Ember and Salty are built in the open and dedicated to the public domain. The translation and preservation work — turning centuries of Catholic writing into structured, multilingual, freely available content — is an ongoing effort that needs sustained support.
If you believe this work matters, consider sponsoring the project.
| Directory | Description |
|---|---|
apps/app/ |
Expo app (iOS, Android, web) |
packages/content-engine/ |
Practice-agnostic flow resolution engine |
packages/divinum-officium/ |
TypeScript port of Divinum Officium: EF Mass and Divine Office |
packages/liturgical/, packages/mass/ |
Liturgical calendar, seasons, OF Mass |
content/ |
Corpus source, one folder per kind (practices/, books/, chapters/, collections/, …) |
docs/ |
Authoring guides, content sources and licensing, design system |
Expo (SDK 55) · Expo Router · Tamagui · Zustand + immer · TanStack Query · expo-sqlite · TypeScript
pnpm install
pnpm start # Expo dev server
pnpm start:web # Web dev server
pnpm ios # iOS simulator
pnpm android # Android emulator
pnpm test # Run all tests- Contributing — how to contribute code and content
- Authoring practices — writing prayer flows
- Book format — book manifest, chapter format, ID conventions
- Content sources — where each Bible translation comes from, credits
- Design system — colors, typography, layout
Everything here — code, content, prayers, liturgical data — is dedicated to the public domain. In jurisdictions where that is not recognized, code falls back to 0BSD and content to CC BY 4.0. See CONTRIBUTING.md for contributor licensing details.
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.