Catholic parishes run on a patchwork of disconnected tools. The software that does exist tends to prioritize financial operations — collections, accounting, reporting — while neglecting the community itself: the Mass schedules, sacrament requests, ministries, and volunteer coordination that are the actual life of a parish.
The gap is sharpest around language. Many parishes serve multilingual communities, yet their tools are English-only, quietly excluding the Spanish- and Tagalog-speaking parishioners who make up a large share of the congregation. Meanwhile staff are left running everything — new-parishioner intake, room scheduling, Safe Environment compliance, communications — by hand. From 50-family missions to 4,000-family cathedrals, the same fragmentation repeats.
Nave is a multi-tenant “Parish OS” that pairs a public, parishioner-facing site with an internal staff back office in a single platform. Built solo with Claude as development partner, it puts the community and language accessibility first — without sacrificing the operational rigor staff need.
Nave is a real multi-tenant application — one platform serving many parishes, each with its own branded site, roster, and staff roles. It runs on the same modern full-stack toolchain behind my other builds: a PostgreSQL database, type-safe data access, role-based authentication across six staff tiers, and auto-translation that keeps content accurate without manual updates. Configuration takes days, not months.
Nave is proof that the systems thinking behind payments platforms — multi-tenancy, role-based access, compliance workflows, real-time accuracy — transfers anywhere a community needs to run itself. Built solo, AI-native, and grounded in real parish life, it started where the best products do: with a specific community whose tools had quietly stopped serving them.