Happy Anniversary & Happy Birthday!!!

This year marks the 15th birthday of this project. Although the exact date was not recorded, it was started early in the year 1997 - and only consisted of 3 manually created and maintained pages.

It was originally started because, at the time, only a handful of dioceses around the world had websites. Simply put there was almost no information on the current (much less historical) Catholic Hierarchy on the web.

5 years later (and 10 years ago today), the website gained its new name and got its own domain: Catholic-Hierarchy.org. Statistics are only available from that time as well.

A more complete history of the project can be found on the site itself.

The site was "unified" (see the link above for more details) in August 2002 - meaning that is when it first covered the entire world. At that time it had entries for 8,700 bishops and 5,300 dioceses (current and historical).

Today the databases cover over 32,500 bishops (roughly 5,200 living, the rest historical). Dioceses are a bit more complicated - as that category now includes current dioceses (roughly 3,100), titular dioceses (roughly 2,200), Cardinal Titles (roughly 250), and historic dioceses make up the rest - totaling a bit over 9,100 now.

The databases also include over 220,000 bishop events, roughly 48,000 source references; 54,000 lineage records; 31,000 diocese statistical records; 12,800 diocese event records;  just under 2,000 external links; and a bit over 500 "group" records (consistories, conclaves, etc.) relating to over 17,000 bishop records.

In the past 10 years, people from around the world have visited the website 19 million times. During those visits that have viewed 123 million individual web pages. A total of roughly 2 terabytes of data.

In the average month (over the last year), there have been 116,000 unique visitors with 216,000 visits, viewing 1.2 million individual web pages.

Last month, the website had visitors from more than 165 countries! The top dozen were: USA, Poland, Italy, Vietnam, Germany, Brazil, France, Australia, Ghana, Mexico, Canada, and Belgium. Vatican City State even appears as #25.

All I can say is: Thank You!

I'm glad ya'll enjoy my little hobby!