Digital infrastructure for the pastoral work of the Catholic Church in Europe — built and operated in-house by a charitable organization, on hardware it owns.
The mission is practical rather than promotional: parishes, shrines, cemeteries and funeral ministries need systems that treat people with dignity, keep their data in their own jurisdiction, and still work on a volunteer's Tuesday evening.
| Layer | What lives there | Representative repositories |
|---|---|---|
| Contracts | Shared domain models, identity, hub services | jol-core, jol-hub, jol-auth |
| Applications | Parish and ministry platforms, commerce, analytics | jol-backend-platform, jol-ecommerce-engine, jol-analytics-ai |
| Presentations | One site per rite and pastoral context, resolved per tenant | jol-site-parish, jol-site-diocese, jol-site-cathedral, jol-site-basilica, jol-site-deanery, jol-site-cemetery-care, jol-site-funeral, jol-site-orthodox, jol-site-protestant, jol-site-other-church |
| AI estate | Retrieval, inference and audited tool servers, kept inside their own network segments | jol-rag-server, jol-llm, jol-mcp-servers, jol-hermes-agents |
| Integrations | Registries, taxonomy, and links to parish management systems | jol-link-registry, jol-domain-taxonomy, jol-bitrix24-integration |
| Platform and governance | Infrastructure as code, hardening, policy, security, compliance, operations | jol-infrastructure, jol-devops, jol-security, jol-compliance, jol-scripts |
Commercial marketplace software is developed in the separate
jolarca-dev organization, with its own
governance and audit surface. Ministry and commerce code are deliberately not
commingled.
- Data stays where it belongs. The platform runs on organization-owned servers in the EU. There is no public-cloud control plane.
- Special category data is treated as such. Religious affiliation is personal data of a sensitive class under GDPR Article 9; systems are designed for that assumption, not excused by it.
- Every production change is recorded. Issue, risk assessment, rollback plan, review, evidence — SOC 2 CC8.1.
- Secrets never enter git. Vault-backed configuration, pre-commit and CI secret scanning, short-lived CI tokens.
- Least privilege by default. Default-deny network policy, pod security standards, no standing administrative access to production.
- Claims are verified or labelled. If a control cannot be demonstrated with command output, it is documented as unverified rather than asserted.
- AI serves the work, not the other way round. Inference is EU-resident, prompts and completions are not retained as a matter of policy, and no output is published to a parish without a human standing behind it.
Read CONTRIBUTING.md first: signed commits, review required, no secrets, and a rollback plan in every pull request.
Report vulnerabilities privately as described in SECURITY.md. Never open a public issue for a security problem.
Questions about scope, partnership or data handling: open an issue in the relevant repository, see SUPPORT.md.
Source in this organization is released under the Apache License 2.0 unless a repository states otherwise. Publishing code under a licence does not create permission to process the data it handles.
This organization and its partners are not a legal, financial, medical or pastoral authority in their own right. Canonical, diocesan and civil requirements take precedence over anything in this software.