The home of the Common Oecumenical Council Data Repository, curated by the Catholic Engineering Task Force of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation.
The Common Oecumenical Council Data Repository (COECDR) provides a canonicalized list of identifiers for the twenty-one ecumenical councils recognized by the Catholic Church, from the First Council of Nicaea (325) to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
Ecumenical councils carry a doctrinal weight and universality that local councils and particular synods do not; this registry is dedicated to them specifically and does not attempt to catalogue local or particular councils.
Canonical council identifiers are needed wherever Catholic data must reference a council unambiguously: doctrinal and magisterial attribution (a canon, decree, or definition is cited by its council), church-history datasets, catechetical and reference works, and cross-references from sibling registries — for instance the Roman Pontiffs (CRPDR) who convened or confirmed a council.
oec:<place-slug>-<roman-ordinal> e.g. oec:nicaea-i, oec:trent-i, oec:vatican-ii
Every identifier carries a Roman-numeral ordinal counting the assemblies held at
that place — oec:nicaea-i and oec:nicaea-ii, oec:lateran-i … oec:lateran-v
— including councils held there only once (oec:trent-i, oec:chalcedon-i), so
that an ID never has to shift if a place is ever used again. The oec: prefix
abbreviates Oecumenical and is deliberately distinct from the ec: that could
be read against the Ecclesiastical Circumscription registry. The full grammar and
the open questions are in docs/schema-proposal.md.
All IDs are drafts pending committee review.
Recognition is not a simple binary, and the registry does not model it as one. The
per-council field recognized_as_ecumenical_by records formal conciliar
reception by the apostolic communions that hold a doctrine of ecumenical
councils: the Catholic Church (all twenty-one), the Eastern Orthodox (the first
seven), the Oriental Orthodox (the first three), and the Assyrian Church of the
East (the first two). Doctrinal esteem beyond formal reception — notably the
authority of the first four councils across much of historic Protestantism — is
described in prose, never entered into that array. See
docs/schema-proposal.md for the full account.
data/councils.json— the seed registry: 21 council records, each with its draft canonical ID, name and aliases, place with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of its modern country, dates, the reigning / convening / confirming Roman Pontiffs as CRPDRrp:cross-references, its formal-recognition set, and a short original summary.registry/councils.md— the same registry as a human-readable table, one row per council in sequence order.docs/schema-proposal.md— the proposed schema, the recognition model, and the open questions for the committee.scripts/generate_registry.py— regenerates the table (python3 scripts/generate_registry.py); tests:python3 -m unittest discover -s scripts.
COECDR is an original compilation. The list of councils, their dates, and their doctrinal significance are matters of public record and Catholic doctrine; the registry authors its own table and prose from general knowledge and takes no third-party tabulation as an authoritative source to capture. The registry follows the Catholic reckoning and takes no position on disputed historical questions beyond presenting that sequence.