Selected Catholic Resources Online

American Catholic History Classroom
(Catholic University of America) A free primary-source site featuring a range of materials related to the American Catholic experience. Site materials focus on historical topics such as race, living wage and industrialization issues, education and Catholic-Jewish relations.

American Catholic Historical Association’s Hidden Catholic Collections Series
A collection of weekly posts that highlight different collections held in Catholic archives across the country on ACHA social media, and have been collected on a page on the ACHA website, creating a permanent resource for students, scholars, and archivists.

ACWR Membership Directory
Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious assists lay and religious archivists in the management, interpretation, and preservation of the historical record of Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States and worldwide.

The Association for Church Archives in Ireland
Founded in 1980, the Association aims to promote the care, preservation and use of church archival collections in Ireland. We host workshops, seminars and visits to archives throughout the year. Information on both male religious orders and female religious orders is available.

Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA)
Strives to democratize access to the best data on religion. The ARDA includes American and international collections and develops features for educators, journalists, religious congregations, and researchers.

The Canadian Catholic Historical Association: Historical Studies
Historical Studies is an annual peer-reviewed publication of the Canadian Catholic Historical Association, which publishes articles on the history of Catholicism in Canada or on topics having a connection with the Catholic Church in Canada. Historical Studies has published continuously since 1933.

The Catholic Church Archives Society
The Catholic Archives Society is a voluntary organisation founded in 1979 with the aim to promote the care of Roman Catholic archives through its work and publications. The Society acts as a forum for all individuals, professional and voluntary, who are custodians of Catholic archival material in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.

The Catholic News Archive
Growing collection of thousands of newspaper pages, from different cities, over multiple years. The collection is fully text searchable and a project of the Catholic Research Resource Alliance (CRRA).

Catholic Research Resource Alliance (CRRA)
A not-for-profit membership alliance of institutions collaborating to deliver projects and services in support of its mission to provide enduring global access to to Catholic research resources in the Americas. New Recording Available: CRRA Webinar: Curating Catholic Web Archives About the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Catholic Worker Newspaper
The Catholic Worker movement began in New York City in 1933. It was founded by Dorothy Day, a radical journalist and Catholic convert, and Peter Maurin, an itinerant French worker/scholar. The Catholic Worker newspaper was launched at the movement’s inception and continues to this day.

Centre for Catholic Studies
Founded in 2007, the Centre for Catholic Studies (CCS) at Durham University represents a creative partnership between academy and church: a centre within the pluralist, public academy for critically constructive Catholic studies of the highest academic standing. New Recordings Available: Hidden Histories Parts I and II

The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy Archives
(Ireland, Kenya, South Africa, United States) The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy is a Catholic women’s religious congregation founded by Catherine McAuley in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland. The Archive holds a range of collections. These include the archives of individual convents, and the archives of diocesan unions.

The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada Archives
On this site you can find downloadable resources including: Archives Policy Manual; Archives Processing Manual; and Medical Artifacts Collection Cataloguing Manual. All the resources are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Convent Collections
(University College Dublin) Established in 2015, this research initiative brings together the expertise of historians, archivists, digital technologists and designers, to develop exciting and important new work including: digital collections of congregational archival materials, virtual reunification of dispersed archival collections, curation and creation of online exhibits, oral histories of women religious, doctoral and post-doctoral research, and publications.

Digital Catholica Collection
(Villanova University) This collection makes available digital content of Catholic materials including books, journals, papers, and manuscripts dealing with the Roman Catholic Church in general, and in particular works created or published in the Americas.

French and Spanish Missions in North America
This resource describes Spanish and French missionizing in North America. The site contains historic, primary source maps and includes a Dynamic TimeMap of Mission History, along with descriptive text and narratives.

Global Sisters Report
Global Sisters Report is an independent, non-profit source of news and information about Catholic sisters and the critical issues facing the people they serve. Their network of journalists report about their lives and works, and sisters write commentary from their perspective.

International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA) The International Mission Photography Archive offers historical images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections in Britain, Norway, Germany and the United States. The photographs, which range in time from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, offer a visual record of missionary activities and experiences in Africa, China, Madagascar, India, Papua-New Guinea and the Caribbean.

Mercy International Association
The most extensive collaboration among Sisters of Mercy, founded by Catherine McAuley in Dublin, Ireland in 1831, has been the creation of the Mercy International Association in 1992.

The National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS)
The National Institute for Newman Studies is creating a nexus where faith and culture, conflict and reconciliation, diversity and unity, can meet and discover new intellectual and religious insights based upon the life, work, and influence of John Henry Newman.

The Society for the Study of the History of Women Religious in Britain and Ireland The History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland (H-WRBI) is an international network that encourages research of women religious and makes available material to facilitate research. An extensive bibliography of research on women religious is available.

The Vatican Library
Holdings include the Vatican’s 8,900 incunabula (books printed before 1501); the Sifra, a Hebrew manuscript written a millenia ago; a fourth (4th) century manuscript of the Greek Bible and the De Europa of Pope Pius II, a printed around 1491.

Women Religious History Sources: A Guide to Repositories in the United States (4th Edition)
Provides scholars with an update to the last comprehensive resource on Women Religious Archives, Women Religious History Sources: A Guide to Repositories in the United States, edited by Evangeline Thomas, CSJ, and published in 1983.