The home of the Common DOCTors of the Church Data Repository, curated by the Catholic Engineering Task Force of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation.
The Common DOCTors of the Church Data Repository (CDOCTDR) provides canonical, stable identifiers for the thirty-eight Doctors of the Church, from the four great Latin Doctors proclaimed by Boniface VIII in 1298 to St. John Henry Newman, proclaimed in 2025.
The title Doctor of the Church (Doctor Ecclesiae) is a formal, restrictive distinction conferred by the Roman Pontiff (or an ecumenical council) on a saint whose writings are of eminent doctrinal value for the whole Church. This registry catalogues those saints so distinguished, and no others; it is not a general registry of theologians, Fathers, or saints.
Canonical Doctor identifiers are needed wherever Catholic data must reference a Doctor of the Church unambiguously: magisterial and catechetical attribution, patristic and theological datasets, reference works, and cross-references from sibling registries — the pope who declared a Doctor (CRPDR) and the saint's own martyrology eulogy (CRMEDR).
doct:<latin-lemma> e.g. doct:thomas-de-aquino, doct:ioannes-a-cruce
The slug is the Doctor's Latin nominative lemma: ASCII-folded, lowercased,
spaces hyphenated, honorific styles (sanctus / beatus) removed, and Latin
connective particles (de, a) retained. Every slug carries the Doctor's full
conventional appellation — a toponym, cognomen, or religious name — so there are
no bare mononyms: Augustine of Hippo is doct:augustinus-hipponensis, never
doct:augustinus. This maximises resolution and future-proofs the namespace
against a later Doctor of the same base name.
Where CRMEDR already carries the same saint, CDOCTDR reuses its Latin lemma, with
two adjustments: a lemma not globally unique among the 38 Doctors is promoted
with its epithet (the two Cyrils), and an inflected eulogy form is normalized to
the clean nominative (doct:ioannes-chrysostomus, not the eulogy's genitive
chrysostomi). The full grammar and derivation rules are in
docs/schema-proposal.md. All IDs are drafts pending
committee review.
CDOCTDR sits deliberately between two siblings and links to both. Each per-record
mr_ref cross-references CRMEDR's mr:
identifier for the Doctor's memorial eulogy in the Roman Martyrology; each
declared_by cross-references CRPDR's
rp: identifier for the proclaiming pope.
Why doct: slugs are Latin while sibling rp: slugs are English. Each
registry's slug language follows its own authoritative source: the Vatican's
English regnal table for CRPDR, and the Latin Martyrologium / Latin declaration
decrees for CRMEDR and CDOCTDR. A saint who is also a pope thus appears under
both conventions, bridged by cross-references — e.g. Gregory the Great is
rp:gregory-i (CRPDR), doct:gregorius-magnus (CDOCTDR), and
mr:0903-gregorius-magnus (CRMEDR). This is a feature, not an inconsistency: the
identifier honours the source that defines the entity in each context.
data/doctors.json— the hand-authored source of truth: 38 Doctor records, each with its draft canonical ID, English and Latin names, life-dates, tradition, honorific title, declaration year and proclaiming pope (declared_by), a martyrology cross-reference (mr_ref), and an original significance summary.registry/doctors.md— the same registry as a human-readable table, one row per Doctor in declaration order.docs/schema-proposal.md— the proposed schema, the identifier grammar, and the open questions for the committee.scripts/—generate_registry.pyregenerates the table (python3 scripts/generate_registry.py) and validates the data as it renders; tests:python3 -m unittest discover -s scripts.
CDOCTDR is an original compilation: the list, dates, and prose significance summaries are authored by the registry in its own words. Convenient online lists (US Catholic, Aleteia, Britannica, Nashville Catholic) are used only as background reading; no third-party table is captured or quoted verbatim.
The one genuinely authoritative primary source is each Doctor's declaration
decree (papal bull or apostolic letter), which fixes the Latin name-form, the
year and proclaiming pope, and often the traditional Latin honorific. These
decrees, not the popular lists, are the reference for the Latin name-forms and
the declared_by / declared_year / honorific_la values in this registry.