Acceptable Use and API Terms

1. Scope and acceptance

These terms govern all use of catholicintelligence.com, its subdomains, its read API, and its Model Context Protocol endpoint at /mcp (together, the “Services”), whether by a person in a browser or by software acting for a person. They are between you and Ocean Edgewater, LLC, a California limited liability company.

You accept them by using the Services. If you operate an agent, client, or crawler that reaches the Services, you accept them for that software and are responsible for what it does.

Datasets purchased from the archive are governed by the Terms of Sale and License, not by these terms.

2. Membership and access

Part of this site is open to anyone. The register itself is kept by invitation: access is granted personally, by a person, and is not a right that asking creates. We may grant, decline, condition, suspend, or withdraw access at our discretion, and we are not obliged to give reasons.

Access is personal to you. Do not share credentials, invitation links, or session cookies, and do not use another person’s. You are responsible for everything done under your access.

Where the Services answer an unauthenticated request with a refusal, that refusal is a statement of the boundary. Treating it as an obstacle to be routed around is a breach of section 4.

3. Rate, volume, and fair use

Use the Services at a rate a human or a well-behaved agent would generate. We apply rate limits and may change them without notice. Do not run concurrent clients, rotate addresses or accounts, or distribute requests in order to exceed a limit.

Honour the robots.txt published at the origin, the Retry-After header, and any 429 response. An automated client must send a user agent that identifies it and a way to reach its operator.

4. What you may not do

You shall not, and shall not permit any person or software to:

1. Extract the register. Systematically download, crawl, harvest, or otherwise accumulate a substantial part of the record through the Services, whether in one pass or by repeated small requests. The Services are for looking things up, not for taking the record. The record is for sale, on terms, in the archive.
2. Resell or redistribute output. Sell, publish, or make available to third parties the results of queries against the Services, or build any directory, index, mapping product, or lead list from them.
3. Train on it. Use responses from the Services as training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or retrieval data for any machine-learning model or artificial-intelligence system offered to third parties, without our prior written consent.
4. Circumvent the boundary. Probe, scan, or test the access controls; use another person’s credentials; forge headers or addresses; or attempt to reach any surface the Services have refused you.
5. Interfere. Impair the availability or integrity of the Services or the systems of anyone else, including by denial of service, injection, or the introduction of malicious code.
6. Misrepresent. State or imply that the Services, or your product built on them, are endorsed by, affiliated with, or issued by the Holy See, any episcopal conference, any diocese, or any parish.
7. Misuse contact information. Send unsolicited commercial bulk messages to, or otherwise harass, surveil, defraud, or target, any cleric, religious, employee, or congregation named in the record.
8. Break the law. Use the Services in violation of applicable law, including data-protection, anti-spam, computer-misuse, and export-control law.

5. Agents and the MCP endpoint

The MCP endpoint is reachable without authentication so that an agent receives a legible answer rather than a parse error, and it gates itself tool by tool. A tool that refuses will say so in the protocol and name where to ask for access. That refusal is authoritative.

An operator who connects an agent to the Services accepts these terms on that agent’s behalf and is responsible for its volume, its identification, and its compliance with section 4. Where an agent acts for an end user, the operator remains responsible.

6. What you send us

Where you submit a correction, a photograph, a news submission, or any other material, you represent that you have the right to send it and that it does not infringe anyone’s rights, and you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce, and publish it as part of the record, with attribution where we have agreed to it. Submitted material is reviewed before it is ever shown. We may decline or remove anything, for any reason.

If you believe material on the Services infringes your copyright, write to [email protected] with the information required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3). We act on valid notices and terminate repeat infringers.

7. Availability, changes, and suspension

The Services are provided “as is” and “as available.” There is no service-level commitment, no uptime guarantee, and no undertaking that any endpoint, field, or response shape will persist. We may add, change, deprecate, or withdraw any part of the Services at any time.

We may suspend or terminate your access immediately, without notice and without refund, on reasonable belief of a breach of section 3 or 4, or to protect the Services or any third party.

8. Disclaimer and liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OCEAN EDGEWATER DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. Nothing retrieved from the Services should be treated as complete, current, or fit for any particular purpose without independent verification. See the Data Provenance and Sourcing Statement.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICES WILL NOT EXCEED ONE HUNDRED UNITED STATES DOLLARS (US$100), AND WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL, OR DATA.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless from any third-party claim arising out of your use of the Services in breach of these terms.

9. Governing law and general

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts in Los Angeles County, California, waiving any objection to that venue. Each party waives trial by jury to the maximum extent permitted by law. Any claim must be brought within one (1) year after it accrues.

We may revise these terms prospectively by publishing a new version here. Continued use after the effective date is acceptance. If a provision is unenforceable it is severed and the rest stands. A failure to enforce is not a waiver. You may not assign these terms; we may.