Catholic Community is a place where Catholics from many countries pray together, share prayers, testimonies and other content, form groups, and hold live meetings by voice. It is free to use.
Use the same email address and password.
Your old password cannot be sent back to you, because it is not stored anywhere in a form that anybody can read. What happens instead is that you prove who you are, and then you set a new password.
The email is written in the language of the account it belongs to, not the language of the person looking at the screen. If you are helping somebody else recover their account, their email will arrive in their own language.
On the same page there is a choice that says you cannot open that email. If you set security questions when you joined, you will be asked them instead. Answer two of them correctly and you may set a new password.
If a code is typed incorrectly several times it stops working, and you should ask for a new one. If an account is attempted many times without success, that account pauses for a short while before it may be tried again. This protects the account and it affects nobody else.
Shortly after you join, you will receive a message from an account called Catholic Community. It is written in advance for everybody who joins, so it will not mention you by anything except your name.
A moderator does read replies to it, though not always quickly.
A day later you will receive one reminder about writing your first post. That is the only reminder of its kind, and nothing else will be sent to you unless somebody writes to you or a meeting begins.
The whole site is available in five languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Filipino. Every button, every message and every notification will appear in the language you choose.
Your choice also decides which posts and which prayer intentions you are shown. You will see the ones written in your own language. This is so that the community you find here speaks to you, rather than scrolling past words you cannot read.
Your choice does not restrict you. You may write in any language you wish, and you may join any group.
You may also change the language at the bottom of this page, or on the sign in page, before you have an account.
The home page shows what other members have shared. You may post whatever builds up the community: a prayer, a testimony, a reflection, a question, an announcement, a photograph, a video, an audio recording or a document.
Your post is reviewed before it appears publicly. This protects the community from unsuitable material and is not a judgement upon you.
You may change a post at any time after you have shared it, and you may remove it altogether. There is no time limit.
Removing a post also removes the comments other members left upon it. This cannot be undone, so please be certain before you choose it.
Under every post there is a place to write a comment. Comments are how most conversation happens here, and a kind word on somebody's post often means more to them than the post itself did.
You may change or remove your own comment. A comment you have changed is marked as edited, so that nobody is misled about what was said. Removing a comment also removes any replies made to it.
The person who made a post may also remove comments upon it, and so may an administrator.
You may emphasise a word or a line as you write, in a post, in a comment, and in a message. Put the mark on each side of what you mean, with no space between the mark and the word.
In a post you may also begin a line with a dash to make a list, with a number and a full stop to make a numbered list, and with the greater-than sign to set a passage apart as a quotation. Two lines or more make a list; a single dash in the middle of a sentence is left alone.
You may react to a post without writing anything. This is useful when somebody has shared something difficult and you do not know what to say.
Below every post there is a share button. You may share a post inside Catholic Community, into one of your chats or into a group. You may also share it outside, in which case your telephone offers the applications you already use.
The person is not told who reported them.
The prayer wall is not the home page. It is a quieter place, for short prayer intentions rather than posts. Write what you would like others to pray for, in up to five hundred characters.
An anonymous intention still reaches everybody. Only your name is withheld, and it is withheld from other members, not from the moderators who look after the community.
You may attach a short voice recording to your intention, so that others hear it in your own voice. This is often easier than writing, and many members find it easier to pray with. You may remove a recording afterwards.
Another member reading your intention may choose I am praying. You will see how many people have done so. They may also leave a comment, and a few words from a stranger who has prayed for you can matter a great deal.
You may delete your own intention at any time, and an administrator may remove one that is unsuitable. Intentions on the wall cannot be reported in the way a post can.
The wall shows intentions in your own language first. If you would like to see and pray for intentions in every language, use the globe to show them all.
Every member has a page of their own. It shows your photograph, your bio, and everything you have shared. When another member taps your name anywhere on Catholic Community, this is what they see.
Your bio is a few lines about yourself. Many members write where they worship, or a favourite prayer, or simply their parish. You may change it from your own page at any time.
You are not obliged to write anything. An empty bio is perfectly normal.
Following somebody means their posts appear in My Feed, so that you see what they share without having to look for it. You do not need their permission, and they are told that you have followed them.
The people who follow you are shown on your page as your followers. You may hide that list if you would rather it were not public.
If you make your page private, only the people who follow you can see it, and you will not appear in the list of members. Your posts stay where they are. What changes is who may look you up.
You may change this at any time in Profile settings.
A group is a smaller community within Catholic Community. A group may belong to a parish, a movement, a family or a course of study. Groups have their own conversation, and meetings are held inside them.
There is no fixed limit upon the number of people in a group. A group may hold several thousand members. Groups on this platform already hold many hundreds, and the notifications are delivered in a manner that keeps very large groups working without delay.
Some groups can only be entered with an access code. The next section explains those.
When you create a group you may ask for it to be listed in the public directory, where any member may find it. A request to be listed is reviewed by the administrators of Catholic Community before the group appears there. This keeps the directory trustworthy.
If you do not ask to be listed, your group still works in every way. You may invite people with its invitation link or its access code. A family group, a parish council or a class does not need to be advertised to anyone.
You may ask for a listing later, or withdraw one, from the group information page. Open the group, tap its name at the top, and look under Group directory.
An access code is a short word of six characters, for example ROSA24, that opens a particular group. The leader of the group gives the code to the people who should be in it. The code may be announced at Mass, printed on a leaflet, or written in a parish bulletin.
If the code is refused, please check it carefully. Letters and numbers are easily confused when they are written by hand. If it is still refused, ask the leader of the group for the current code, because a leader may change it at any time.
To require a code for your own group, open the group, tap its name at the top, and look under Access code. You may create a code, replace it with a new one, or turn the requirement off. When you replace a code, the previous one stops working immediately.
A meeting room is a live meeting held by voice, inside a group. A group may use it for whatever it needs: the Rosary, a novena, a catechism class, a Bible study, a choir rehearsal, a council meeting, a training session or an announcement to the whole community. Anyone in the group may listen. The person leading decides who may speak.
To see meetings that are planned for a later time, tap the name of the group at the top of the conversation, then choose Meetings.
If a meeting is arranged for later, its page shows the time in your own clock and how long there is to wait. You may open that page as early as you like.
A meeting does not begin by itself at the appointed hour. Somebody leading it must start it, so that a room is never open with nobody in it. When the hour arrives the page says so and waits with you, and it opens by itself the moment the meeting starts.
You may also choose Notify me on that page, and your telephone will tell you when it begins.
If you have been given a turn to speak and your telephone loses its connection, or you leave the meeting and come back, your turn is kept. You will find the Speak button waiting for you rather than having to ask again.
Your turn is only ended by the person leading the meeting.
Inside the meeting there is a control marked Meeting volume, with Quieter at one end and Louder at the other. Move it to set how loud the meeting is in your ear. What you choose is remembered, so you do not have to set it again next time.
On an Android telephone the volume buttons on the side of the telephone will not change a meeting, because the telephone reserves those buttons for calls. Use the control on the screen instead. On an iPhone the buttons work as usual and no control is shown.
While you are speaking, the person leading may switch your microphone off. This is usually because something noisy has begun where you are, and it is not a rebuke.
You are told the moment it happens, and you keep your turn. Choose Unmute whenever you are ready and you are heard again. Nobody has to give you anything back.
In some meetings the person leading may also switch your microphone back on for you. This is only possible if they chose it when creating the meeting, only for somebody who already has a turn to speak, and you are told the moment it happens. You may switch it off again at once.
A meeting room is built for large gatherings. Only the people who have been given the floor send sound. Everybody else receives it. This is what allows one room to hold well over one thousand listeners, and two thousand or more, without the meeting becoming difficult to follow.
The list of names shown on your screen stops at sixty, so that the page remains readable upon a telephone. Everybody else is present and hearing the meeting, and the true number of participants is always shown.
The person creating a meeting may ask for a register of who attends. Most meetings do not have one. When one is being kept you are told so on the way in, and again inside the meeting, so it is never a surprise.
Only the administrators of the group can see the register. It shows who was present, when they arrived and how long they stayed.
An administrator finds it by opening the group, tapping its name at the top, and choosing Attendance for the last meeting. It stays there after the meeting has ended, so there is no hurry.
Visitors who join without an account are never recorded, whatever the meeting.
If you would rather not be on a register, you are free not to attend that meeting. Nothing else about you is recorded either way.
The person leading may pin one line to the meeting, which everybody sees, including anybody who joins later. It might say when the prayer will begin, or ask people to keep their microphones off.
It is cleared when the meeting ends and is never part of a recording.
A meeting is started by the owner of the group, or by one of the administrators of that group. The person who starts it leads it, and the other administrators of the group may lead it as well.
If you would like to lead meetings in a group, ask the owner of that group to make you an administrator. The owner opens the group, taps the name of the group at the top, finds your name in the list of members, and chooses Make admin.
You do not need to be an administrator in order to speak. Any member may speak during a meeting once the person leading gives them the floor.
A meeting may serve more than one group. If the person leading also looks after another group, they may invite that group in, and its members join the same meeting from their own group in the ordinary way.
This does not join the two groups together. The other group's members do not become members of yours, they cannot see your conversation, and nothing changes about either group once the meeting ends. They are borrowing the room for an hour.
The meeting still belongs to the group that created it. Any recording is placed there, and the people who lead it are its own administrators.
Choose Leave, and you will be asked to confirm. The back button on your telephone asks in the same way, so a meeting is not lost to a stray touch.
If you are the person recording, the question says so, because leaving ends the recording.
Once the meeting is arranged, the same screen offers Invite group, so that another group you look after may attend as well.
While leading, you may give the floor to a person who raised a hand, take the floor back, open the floor to everyone, or remove a person who is disturbing the meeting. Your queue of messages is marked with a dove and a number.
If a speaker's surroundings become noisy you may quieten their microphone without taking their turn. They are told, and may switch it back on themselves when they are ready. If you chose it when creating the meeting, you may also switch a speaker's microphone back on for them.
If you are the person who created the meeting, you may quieten another administrator in the same way.
In a large meeting only the first sixty names are drawn. Use the box above the list to find anybody by name, and people who have just arrived are shown near the top so you can reach them quickly.
A meeting can only be recorded if the person creating it declared, at the moment of creation, that it may be recorded. A meeting that was not declared in this way can never be recorded.
When you create a meeting you may choose to allow guests. A guest is somebody who opens your meeting link without having an account here. They are asked only for a name, and then they may listen.
This is useful for a talk, a recollection or a funeral, where you wish to invite people who are not yet part of the community. If you would rather keep the meeting to members, simply leave the setting off.
You may write privately to another member, or hold a conversation in a group. Choose Messages to see your conversations.
Press and hold any message. A list of actions appears. You may reply to it, copy it, forward it to somebody else, keep it with a star so that you can find it again, or react to it with a symbol such as praying hands. If the message is yours, you may edit or delete it.
In a private conversation, choose the telephone symbol at the top to call that person. The call is between the two of you. Calls are never recorded.
Notifications tell you when somebody writes to you, comments on your post, calls you, or begins a meeting. You will also receive one reminder a day after you join, about writing your first post.
If you are using the application and you notice a message asking you to switch notifications on, please do so. Without notifications you will not know that somebody has written to you until you open the application yourself.
On the page of a meeting that is planned for a later time, choose Notify me when it starts. Your telephone will alert you at the moment the meeting begins.
You may silence a single group without leaving it. Open the group, tap its name at the top, and choose Mute notifications. You will still see the messages when you open the group.
Catholic Community is a place of prayer. A small number of people join such places in order to deceive others, and we take this seriously.
You may also report a post or a comment on the main feeds. Open the three dots upon it and choose Report. The person is not told who reported them, and a moderator reads every report.
There is also a quieter option, for when you are not certain enough to accuse anybody. Open the menu at the top of a private conversation and choose the option that says you are not sure about this person. Nothing is said to that person, and nothing changes in your conversation. A moderator simply sees your note, and can see whether other members have felt the same about the same person.
You may block a person at any time from the menu at the top of your conversation with them. They will not be able to write to you or call you.
Open Profile settings. You may decide who is able to send you messages, and you may switch off incoming calls. You may also make your profile private, so that only the people who follow you can see what you share.
Catholic Community is watched over by moderators, who read every report that is sent to them.
When a member is new, their posts are read before they appear publicly.
Some meetings keep a register of who attended, which the group's administrators can see. You are told before you enter and again inside the meeting, and visitors without an account are never recorded.
There is a limit on how many people you may write to for the first time in one day. Almost nobody notices it, because replying to somebody, or writing to somebody who already follows you, does not count towards it. It exists so that no single person can write to hundreds of members at once. If you are ever stopped by it, simply continue the next day.
Open Profile settings to change your name, your photograph, your bio, your parish or your language.
In Profile settings you may switch on one tap sign in. When it is on, the devices you sign in from will show your photograph on the sign in page, and tapping it signs you in without typing your password.
Switching it off signs out every device that had remembered you.
You may delete your account yourself, at any time, from your profile page. Deletion removes your personal information, your posts, your comments and your other content. Where you have written to another person, the message remains in that person's conversation, but it is no longer connected to your name.
Catholic Community works in any web browser. There is also an application for Android telephones and an application for iPhone. Search for Catholic Community in the Play Store or in the App Store.
The application is recommended for three reasons. It alerts you even when your browser is closed. It allows a meeting to continue playing when your screen is switched off. It allows voice calls to sound as an ordinary telephone call does.
If you use Catholic Community in a web browser on a computer or on an Android telephone, your browser can alert you as well. You will be asked once whether you permit it, and you should answer yes. On an iPhone this is not possible, so if you use an iPhone and wish to be told when somebody writes to you, please install the application.
When a new version is available, the application will tell you. Please accept these updates, because they often carry corrections that other members have helped us to find.
If something on this site does not work as this guide describes, or if you cannot find what you need, please write to us at support@maryourhelp.org. Please describe what you were doing and what happened. If you are able to include a photograph of your screen, that helps us considerably.
Catholic Community is operated by Mary Our Help.