For those Catholics itching to be absolved, a Scottish Archbishop may have just revolutionized the search for a confessional — with a new smartphone and tablet app launched at the Vatican on Tuesday.
The Catholic app, which has inevitably been dubbed “Sindr” by some media and online commentators, is expected to go live in early 2017, according to Vatican Radio.
“The idea was really inspired by the Holy Father himself,” Edinburgh’s Archbishop Leo Cushley, who announced the launch, told Vatican Radio. “He said to be imaginative about what to do for the Holy Year of Mercy.”
The app, which lets users search for the nearest Holy Mass, confessional or diocesanal statistics, reportedly uses technology by software firm Musemantik to guide the faithful from their current location to the nearest Catholic Church.
“I hope everyone’s going to use it,” Cushley said, in hopes that the legacy of Pope Francis’ so-called Extraordinary Year of Jubilee, which just drew to a close, “won’t only be a spiritual one, it will also be a practical one.”
Cushley launched the app at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, calling it a “smart bit of technology” that could impact “how the Catholic Church brings the mercy of God and the joy of the Gospel to our contemporary world.”
- The Fall of Roe and the Failure of the Feminist Industrial Complex
- The Ocean Is Climate Change’s First Victim and Last Resort
- Column: 6 Proven Ways to Reduce Gun Violence
- Ads Are Officially Coming to Netflix. Here's What That Means for You
- Jenny Slate on the Unifying Power of a Well-Heeled Shell Named Marcel
- Column: The FDA's Juul Ban May Not be a Pure Public Health Triumph
- What the Supreme Court’s Abortion Decision Means for Your State