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As he describes himself on his now-dormant Twitter account, David M. Cheney is, in some ways, just a “Random Catholic Dude.”
He works a full-time computer support job, loves to travel, opens emails with “howdy,” and belongs to the Church of the Holy Cross in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas.
Cheney is also the person behind the longest-running online database for information about the bishops and dioceses of the global Catholic Church.
Asked why he started Catholic-Hierarchy.org more than 20 years ago, the 56-year-old Kansas native said, “Part of it is just because it’s not available anywhere else.”
The website, which includes both current and historical data for the Church’s hierarchy, had 612,000 visits and 1.3 million page views in a recent 30-day period. In one month this year, the site saw visitors from almost every country in the world.
Cheney told CNA in a video call from his home this month that the website started out as a simple project to teach himself web design.
“I was working at Texas A&M University running the computers for the economics department, and I needed a project to start learning web skills. This was back in the late ’90s,” he said.
“At the time I counted six dioceses around the world that had websites,” Cheney said. “That was it. So basically, I started, you know, just playing with it.”
Humble beginnings
In 1997, Cheney created an experimental Paradox database consisting of three web pages: “Who’s New,” “Open Sees,” and “Age Limit” for current bishops of the United States. At the time, he maintained everything manually.
Things took off from there.
Cheney has a relative — a former abbess of a religious order who lives in Guatemala — whom he visited. This fact led him to expand the website beyond the United States.
“So I went ahead and added Canada and Mexico and Central America,” he said.
The next addition, Cheney explained, came from Lima, Peru. Someone at ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner founded in 1980, “was kind enough to give me basically an Excel spreadsheet that had all the current bishops of South America.”
At that point, “Why not go all the way?” he thought.
“It always left holes. If I didn’t include everything so I just went ahead and expanded it to the world.”
On May 10, 2002, the Catholic-Hierarchy.org web domain was born.
How it works
Cheney said he reads the news bulletin from the Vatican every day to know what new bishops the pope has nominated or to get information about bishop retirements or transfers.
He then inputs any new data into the website. Other information, such as bishops’ ages, updates automatically.
Besides the Vatican bulletin, Cheney has gotten a lot of historical information on bishops from his collection of the Annuario Pontificio, or pontifical directory. He has acquired copies from the years 1914 to 2022, though he is missing a handful, he said.
Historical researchers also share information with the webmaster. And he has shared his database with other researchers. Google Books has also been a useful resource, he said. Continue reading
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