Speculum Fidei — The Mirror of the Faith
An API-first platform for the Catholic intellectual and devotional tradition.
Website · Developer Portal · API Docs · Get an API Key · About
α Alpha
The platform is developed privately. This repository is the public threshold — where developers find their way in.
If you are a Catholic developer and you want to build something — a prayer app, a liturgical calendar widget, a saint lookup tool — you will quickly discover the same thing every one of us has discovered: the data is everywhere and nowhere. PDFs of the Summa scattered across university servers. Hagiographic databases behind paywalls or riddled with errors. Liturgical calendar APIs that disagree with each other.
Torch & Lily exists to end that. One unified API. Five structured engines. Everything a Catholic developer needs to build without reinventing the wheel.
| Engine | Prefix | Domain |
|---|---|---|
| Veritas | /v1/veritas |
Scripture, Summa Theologiae, Opera, Patristic Commentaries |
| Devotio | /v1/devotio |
Saints, Hagiography, and the Catholic Prayer Tradition |
| Tempus | /v1/ordo |
Liturgical Calendar — feasts, seasons, colors, computed for any date |
| Corpus | /v1/corpus |
Sacred Site Mapping — every parish and cathedral worldwide |
| Communio | /v1/communio |
Intercessory Prayer Network — anonymous, global, real-time |
Full reference at the API Docs.
The name carries the architecture.
The Torch is the backend — immutable, objective, illuminating. It holds the record of what is true: the texts, the saints, the calendar, the geography. It does not speculate. It does not hallucinate. It serves what has been verified.
The Lily is the frontend — the living, growing space where developers and users actually dwell. The Developer Portal — Ostium, the Gate — is the threshold between those two worlds.
The platform is API-first and natively accessible to LLM agents via the Model Context Protocol. One config block connects Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client to the entire Tradition.
Nearly all of the text data in Torch & Lily is public domain: the Douay-Rheims rather than a modern translation; the pre-1927 hagiographic record rather than contemporary biographies; Aquinas as Aquinas wrote him.
We frame this not as a limitation but as a foundation. These texts have survived centuries precisely because they are trustworthy. They are not behind a paywall because they belong to everyone. The Refinery — our AI ingestion pipeline — does not generate theological data. It cleans, structures, and verifies it against primary sources. Every record that fails verification is flagged, retried, and if necessary, removed.
"Sicut maius est illuminare quam lucere solum, ita maius est contemplata aliis tradere quam solum contemplari."
"For even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so is it better to give to others the fruits of one's contemplation than merely to contemplate."
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, Q.188, A.6
curl https://api.torchandlily.com/v1/devotio/saints/thomas-aquinas \
-H "X-API-Key: tl_your_key_here"- Create an account and generate a key from your dashboard.
- Read the docs — start with Authentication, then pick an engine.
- Build something. Access is currently free during the Alpha.
Torch & Lily is a living archive. The platform code is private, but the data is open to faithful contribution: saints, prayers, sacred texts, patristic commentaries, and corrections to existing records.
If you would like to contribute, begin at the Scriptorium. Style guides for each content type are linked from there.
This project is built and maintained by one developer and responds accordingly: personally, and without a ticket system.
For integration questions, data corrections, bug reports, feature requests, or anything else:
→ Share Your Voice → Or write directly: dev@torchandlily.com
Please do not open issues on this repository — it is a brochure, not a tracker. The Vox form reaches the builder directly.
Aedificamus Civitatem Dei. We are building the City of God.
— S. Dominice, ora pro nobis.
© 2026 Torch & Lily · The Digital Scriptorium · α Alpha
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Catholic Church, the Holy See, or any diocese.