Texts & Rights

The texts are public domain, and we claim nothing over them

Scripture, the Fathers, the councils, the catechisms and the commentaries we host are all in the public domain. Buckley’s 1852 translation, Newman’s Catena Aurea, the Douay-Rheims: none of these are ours, and putting them on a web page does not make them ours. Take them, copy them, republish them. We would rather they spread.

Each work’s page names its edition, translator, publisher and source, so you can go to the original for yourself and check us.

The connections between them are our work

What makes this an archive rather than a pile of books is the set of links running between the texts: which verse a council canon rests on, which Father commented on which passage, why the connection matters. Deciding what to connect, and writing the note explaining it, is authorship. Those connections and their captions are © Lectio Studies, along with the selection and arrangement of the collection as a whole.

Quote them, cite them, teach from them. Reproducing the connection set wholesale, or extracting it in bulk to build a competing service, is not something we license.

Lectio Reading Editions

Where a work exists in no public-domain English translation, we sometimes produce our own, marked as a Lectio Reading Edition and always offered alongside the original rather than in place of it. Those translations are new work and are all rights reserved. How they are made, and what we will and will not do in making them, is set out in our Sacred Translation Standard.

Works we cite but do not host

Some texts are still under copyright: the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the 1983 Code of Canon Law and others. We do not reproduce them. Where the archive refers to them it gives the address only, a paragraph or canon number you can look up in an authorised edition. That is a deliberate limit, not a gap waiting to be filled.

Automated access

Search engines are welcome. Bulk automated crawling that degrades the site for readers is rate-limited, and we reserve the right to block it.

If you want the public-domain texts in bulk, please do not scrape them from us: go to the Internet Archive, CCEL or Project Gutenberg, which is where we got them and which are set up to serve them. If you want to work with the connection data, write to us instead. We would rather talk than throttle.