Every item on this site carries a label saying what standing the Church actually gives it. The labels are the Church's own words, not ours, and they are there so you can weigh each thing for yourself instead of taking our word for it.
They are information, not gatekeeping. Nothing is hidden here because its standing is weak, and nothing is dressed up as more settled than it is.
The Church positively permits and encourages this for public use. This is the ordinary situation for the cult of a canonized saint — canonization is the authorization — and for devotions whose texts are carried in the liturgy.
What it does not mean: that every word on our page is approved. Where we have written the arrangement or the reflections ourselves, we say so, and that writing carries no standing of its own.
An indulgence has been formally attached to the practice by competent authority.
We only use this label where a grant can be cited. A great many devotions are described as indulgenced in popular writing with no document behind the claim, and the Angelus and the 54-Day Rosary Novena are both cases where we looked, could not find the grant, and therefore do not claim it. Nothing here currently carries this label.
A bishop with jurisdiction has examined an alleged private revelation — an apparition, a message — and judged it worthy of belief. This is the strongest standing any private revelation gets, and it is rarer than devotional writing implies.
We require a named authority and a date before using it. Our Lady of Lourdes has both: Bishop Bertrand-Sévère Laurence of Tarbes, January 1862.
What it does not mean: that you are obliged to believe it. No private revelation binds a Catholic, however well attested. The deposit of faith was complete without it.
No authority has ruled either way. Nobody approved it and nobody condemned it.
This is not a warning, and it is the ordinary situation for most private devotions — particularly the nineteenth-century Italian ones, which were absorbed into ordinary practice through papal support for the shrines and the derivative devotions without anyone ever running a formal investigation.
The 54-Day Rosary Novena is the example on this site. The Rosary itself needs no defending; what carries no judgment is the 54-day form and the 1884 account behind it.
Competent authority has judged against it. Nothing on this site carries this label, and if something ever does it will be because the material is worth understanding, with the judgment stated plainly at the top.
Because a reader who removes everything unproven should still find what remains worth having. That is the test we apply to ourselves, and it only works if we are the ones marking which is which.
The vocabulary above describes devotions — what the Church has said about a prayer or a practice. The apparitions index needs something the vocabulary above cannot express, and finding that out was the most useful thing that has happened to this site.
Five entries there were labeled simply approved. Checked one at a time against the rule that the cited act has to support the standing itself, not merely something neighboring it, not one of the five survived. Benedict XIV's act of 1754 confirmed Our Lady of Guadalupe as Patroness of New Spain and approved a proper Mass and Office. Clement XIII in 1765 approved the liturgical celebration of the Sacred Heart. Joan of Arc's condemnation was overturned in 1456 and she was canonized in 1920. Every one of those is a real, dated, citable act — and not one of them says the apparition happened.
So each apparition now records two facts:
A permitted devotion is not evidence that the apparition behind it was approved. The clearest case is Amsterdam: the devotion is permitted, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith judged the phenomenon constat de non supernaturalitate in 1974, Paul VI approving. Both things are true at once, and one label could only tell you one of them. It sat here as "contested" until somebody read the file.
And a result worth stating plainly: no entry on that page carries a decree of the Holy See declaring an apparition supernatural. Every positive judgment is a local bishop's — Leiria for Fatima, Tarbes for Lourdes, Gap for Laus, Green Bay for Champion. That is not a hole in our research. It is how the Church assigns the competence, and it is invisible while everything is filed under one word.
It has consequences we accept. Several widely repeated claims are missing from this site because we went looking for the document and did not find it: that Leo XIII indulgenced the 54-day novena; the promise attached to the prayer of St. Gertrude about a specific number of souls; the indulgences usually said to attach to the Angelus. Each of those may well be true. None of them is something we can show you, so we do not assert it.
A claim repeated by six websites in nearly the same words is one source, not six. When an old, popular, easily checkable claim has no citation anywhere, the absence is evidence.
Each label appears on its item's page, and tapping it gives the reasoning for that item specifically. It also sits in the page's structured data as a PropertyValue with propertyID: "standing", so anything reading this site by machine gets the same information you do.