A Chi-Rho bar widget that keeps Scripture, the Catechism, the Church’s prayers, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the saint of the day one click away.
St. Jerome once wrote that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. The line is not a rebuke to the ordinary Christian; it is an invitation. The Church has always wanted her Scriptures, her teaching, and her prayer to be the inheritance of the faithful, not the preserve of specialists. She wants us to know them, to pray them, and to let them shape the day.
“Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
— St. Jerome
For most of us, the day happens at a screen. Work, study, correspondence, the small tasks that fill a life—they all happen on a desktop. Catholic Reference begins with that reality. It is a small Chi-Rho in the bar at the top of the screen. A left click opens a quiet panel with six tabs, and the Church’s resources are no longer in another room or another browser tab. They are where the day already is.
A quiet library in the bar
Catholic Reference is an Omarchy Quattro bar widget that opens over the desktop in the theme’s own colours. It is not a browser app, not a feed, and not a notification machine. It is a reader and a prayer book that happens to live in the bar.
Everything except the daily readings is bundled and works offline. The Readings tab makes one request to universalis.com the first time it is opened each day and then reads from a local cache; the Saint tab is entirely offline. The plugin runs no background services and asks for no elevated privileges.
The six tabs are Bible, Catechism, Prayers, Readings, Hours, and Saint. The header also has a Pop out button that moves the reader into a resizable window with more room for longer passages.
Scripture, study, and prayer
The Bible, with the Fathers
The Bible tab is the full 73-book Douay-Rheims (Challoner) text. With nothing typed, it opens on the whole canon: the Old Testament by division—Pentateuch, Historical Books, Wisdom Books, the Prophets—and the New Testament by the Gospels, Acts, the Letters of St. Paul, the Catholic Letters, and Revelation. Type a word or phrase and the search is fuzzy; type a reference and it understands Mat, Mat 4, Mat 4:23, or Mat 4:23-25. Click a verse to copy it, or pin it with the Catena Aurea.
The Catena Aurea is St. Thomas Aquinas’s Golden Chain, a compilation of commentary from the early Church Fathers on the four Gospels. The Bible tab also has a random button—a small way to meet a passage you did not plan to read.
The Catechism at hand
The Catechism tab holds all 2,865 paragraphs of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Search is fuzzy, so a half-remembered phrase can find the paragraph you need; click a paragraph to copy it with its CCC number. With nothing typed, the tab opens on the Prologue and the four Parts, down to each Article, with cross-references to follow. It puts the Church’s own text within reach when a question arises.
The common prayers
The Prayers tab gathers the Church’s common prayers in English and Latin: the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, the Apostles’ Creed, the Fatima Prayer, the Prayer to St. Michael, Hail Holy Queen, the Memorare, the Angelus, the Soul of Christ, and the Rosary prayers. Click a prayer to read it in both languages.
The Church’s day
The readings and Lectio Divina
The Readings tab loads the day’s Mass readings: the First Reading, Responsorial Psalm, Second Reading, Gospel Acclamation, and Gospel, with the liturgical colour and the Lectionary cycle (Year A/B/C and Weekday I/II). The readings come from universalis.com and are cached locally. A button, Pray with today’s Gospel, opens a guided Lectio Divina.
The four steps are Lectio, Meditatio, Oratio, and Contemplatio—read, reflect, respond, rest. The passage is the Douay-Rheims text; the Meditatio step draws on the Catena Aurea, so the early Church Fathers are part of the meditation. The disciples on the road to Emmaus found their hearts burning as the Lord opened the Scriptures (Luke 24:32); the Catena lets you hear how the Fathers heard those same words.
The Liturgy of the Hours
The Hours tab carries the office for Morning Prayer (Lauds), Daytime, Evening Prayer (Vespers), and Night Prayer (Compline). The current hour is selected by default, and the liturgical day is shown above the text. It is a way of letting the Church’s prayer mark the hours of the day, not only the beginning and the end.
Today’s saint
The Saint tab shows today’s liturgical celebration from a bundled modern Roman calendar used in the US, including optional memorials. It names the saint or feast, its rank and season, gives a quotation and a short biography, and links to Franciscan Media and Wikipedia for more. On ferias and Sundays it names the liturgical day. The tab is fully offline and loads no images.
Rooted, not closed
Catholic Reference is deliberately rooted in Roman Catholic sources. The Bible is the Douay-Rheims (Challoner); the commentary is the Catena Aurea; the Catechism is the Catechism of the Catholic Church; the prayers and Hours are the Church’s; the calendar is the modern Roman calendar used in the US.
It is an independent, open-source work and has no official connection with the Church, but it is designed to stay strictly with the Church’s own texts so that Catholics can use it with confidence.
But its rootedness is not a fence. It is not meant to exclude anyone interested in strengthening their faith.
Install
Catholic Reference is an Omarchy Quattro plugin. Install it from the repository, then move it to the right side of the bar:
omarchy plugin add https://github.com/whelanh/omarchy-catholic-reference.git --enable
omarchy bar move io.github.whelanh.catholic-reference --section rightNo extra packages are needed: Python 3 and wl-clipboard are part of Omarchy. The Readings tab needs network access for its once-a-day fetch; everything else works offline. The plugin runs no background services and asks for no elevated privileges. To remove it:
omarchy plugin remove io.github.whelanh.catholic-referenceThe source, full documentation, and data notices are at github.com/whelanh/omarchy-catholic-reference. It is listed on the official Omarchy plugin site.
A compatible desktop theme can be found at Rosary for Omarchy: twenty public-domain paintings for the mysteries, the correct set for the day installed automatically, a crucifix cursor, and matching terminal rice. The plugin works with any Omarchy theme, but the two were made for each other.
At your fingertips
It does not make the practices automatic. It makes them easier to begin. A bar icon is a small thing; but if it helps you open the Gospel at lunch, look up a paragraph of the Catechism when a question arises, or pray Lauds before the day begins, it has done its work.
“Thy word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my paths.”
— Psalm 119:105 (Douay-Rheims)
Credits and licenses. Catholic Reference is MIT licensed. The Douay-Rheims Bible and the Catena Aurea are public domain. The Catechism, prayers, and office are included with their sources and terms documented in the plugin’s NOTICE.md and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. The calendar is generated from romcal (MIT); saint biographies come from daily-saints and catholic-readings-api; the daily readings are fetched from universalis.com and cached. The screenshots are from the author’s desktop.
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