“I started out thinking I was going to help 200 people get to Mass.”
We’re delighted to share the appearance of Catholic Mass Times in Ecclesia, the magazine of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference. The interview, written by Elena Martín Tascón and published on August 13, catches Pablo Licheri at exactly the moment of year when the app is needed most. Summer arrives, routines break down, people pack their bags and, almost without noticing, stop going to Mass. The project was born twelve years ago to push back against that quiet drift.
Founded in 1941 and published by the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, Ecclesia is a reference publication on the life of the Church across the Spanish-speaking world. During the Second Vatican Council, it carried news from Rome to Spain and Latin America. Its interview traces the whole road: from the 260 churches Licheri loaded by hand in 2014 to the more than 138,000 the app gathers today across the globe.
It all began at a spiritual retreat, where a priest preached on the infinite value of every single Mass. Pablo Licheri, who was working at a bank in Buenos Aires at the time, in the fintech world, learned to code from scratch and released the first version of the app
on March 19, 2014,the feast of St. Joseph. No diocese was able to give him the complete listings he needed, so he loaded the churches one by one and verified every user contribution himself. As the interview puts it,
borrowing a well-worn line from the startup world, you have to do things that don’t scale.Today the app records around 10,000 updates a month,because a single photograph of a parish noticeboard is enough to correct a schedule within minutes.
The original idea had been something else entirely: a website that would stream Masses over the internet twenty-four hours a day. A friend talked him out of it, arguing that broadcasting might pull people away from the church building rather than draw them toward it, and suggested something simpler instead: a free Catholic app for finding Mass nearby.
The project eventually outgrew him. His children helped first, then volunteers arrived, and when 3,000 churches piled up awaiting verification, he began hiring part of the team. It only takes one person per parish keeping the times current for the whole system to work.
A decade ago, Pablo Licheri dreamed of reaching one million people and considered it out of reach. The app now counts
2.4 million downloadsand roughly 250,000 active users each month, with a target of ten million by 2028–2030. It works in every country and in 40 languages, which means almost any Catholic in the world can use it in their own tongue. The United States is where the app is growing fastest, something the founder connects to a resurgence of Catholic faith.More young people in parishes, digital evangelizers and Catholic creators reaching growing audiences, and a steady stream of conversions from other Christian denominations. In a country where Catholics are a minority, a new convert opens the app and discovers something that genuinely astonishes them: the Catholic Church is everywhere in the world.The service remains free and ad-free, sustained for years by Licheri’s own family and today by user donations. Catholic Mass Times has shown that moving to a new city doesn’t mean giving up Sunday Mass..
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