Churches Visited in 2018

I started the GCatholic website about 20 years ago to collect information on the Catholic Church that interests me. The first data that went into the website was a list of churches in the Archdiocese of Toronto, as I had just started the habit of visiting churches close to where I was living. I believe this was due to a special experience I encountered when visiting a simple parish church around Christmas time.

Fast forward to the present, GCatholic is now the largest database of Catholic churches, with the information and precise locations of more than 63,000 churches around the world accessible in the website. Over the years I have travelled to many countries around the world just to admire churches. Cathedrals and basilicas are prioritized, as they are usually the most significant and most beautiful churches in each country. (My website is the first to feature a comprehensive list of Catholic cathedrals and basilicas in the world, through many years of my research.) Shrines are also my favourites, especially those where apparitions, miracles or strong devotions are involved. I also visit Orthodox and Anglican cathedrals.

When I visit a church, I pray and occasionally attend liturgy therein, as well as taking many photographs. When these pictures have been copied to my computer, I would then tag each picture with the name, city, country and diocese of the church in the IPTC metadata of each file. As each Catholic church I have visited is added into my database, the picture file is also tagged with the ID number of the church. This allows my software program I wrote to read all my picture files and generate lists customized to my use. For instance, I can easily generate a list of churches that I visited for a particular year and calculate their statistics. I can also easily find the filenames of the pictures for a particular church. The latter is important, as I have more than 80,000 picture files, placed in folders according to the diocese, which in turn are categorized in country subdivisions, countries and continents.

After the year 2017 with a record of 895 churches visited, I decided to take it easy this year. In 2018, I visited a total of 780 different churches, of which 739 are Catholic, 19 are Orthodox and 25 are Protestant. Out of the Catholic churches, 102 are cathedrals, 80 are basilicas, and 22 belong to the Eastern rites. It surprised me that this is the year that I visited the greatest number of cathedrals. I also visited 5 Orthodox cathedrals and 8 Episcopalian cathedrals this year.

Let me share with everyone a collage of 100 cathedrals that I visited this year. Enjoy!

May I wish everyone a blessed year of 2019!