“The real encounter happens in the Eucharist, not on the screen”
We are delighted to share that Catholic Mass Times was featured in Religión en Libertad! Álex Rosal, founder and director of the leading Spanish-language religious news outlet, interviewed Pablo Licheri twelve years after the spiritual retreat where the idea was born. The conversation reveals figures we had never shared before: the app brings together more than 138,000 churches in 245 countries and territories and has logged more than 40 million searches. Behind each one of them, the founder reminds us, is a person who was seeking to encounter Christ in the Eucharist.
A good part of the interview dwells on testimonies, an area Religión en Libertad takes special care with. Licheri recalls messages from people who had been away from the faith for decades and who, in the middle of a personal crisis, returned to Confession and to Mass thanks to the app. Someone even wrote to tell him he had entered the seminary. Users have left more than 50,000 five-star reviews in the app stores. And searches for Confession and Adoration are growing notably, especially during Lent and before the great feasts.
The interview also devotes space to the universality of the Church. When you zoom in on the map and see churches covering entire continents, that truth of the Creed becomes visible and verifiable. As the article puts it, “the catholicity of the Church is not a metaphor.” The map also reveals where the work is hardest: in many developing countries, parishes have no website of their own, and the app becomes the only source of up-to-date schedules, kept going there by lay people who enter the data from their phones.
In closing, Licheri makes a concrete request of pastors and those responsible for diocesan communications: to let us know every time they change a schedule. Though it may seem like a small gesture, it makes a big difference, because behind every outdated schedule is someone who arrives at a locked door. That work has sustained the app from day one, free and ad-free, through the efforts of thousands of users and the donations of those who believe in the project. If your parish has changed its schedule, you can update it in seconds right from the app.
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Read the full interview on the Religión en Libertad website now!
