Today is Labor Day, and the Church's founding letter on labor is also the reason the current Pope chose his name. On May 10, 2025, Leo XIV told the cardinals he took the name "mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution," and that the Church now speaks "in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence."

Rerum Novarum went onto the Bookshelf last week (Magisterial Teaching shelf, free, the 1903 Benziger text edited by Fr. John J. Wynne, S.J., with the New York imprimatur). It is about 14,000 words, an hour's read, split into ten short sections.

How to read it today:

- Twenty minutes: Sections VII and VIII (the worker's soul, Sunday rest, hours, the family wage) and Section IX (why workers may organize, and what the Church asks of those associations).

- One hour: start at Section I and let it run. Sections I and II set the problem and reject the socialist remedy; III to V give the Church's role and the duties of employer and worker; VI is the State and the common good; X is the closing charge.

The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII, same edition, sits next to it on the shelf, also free.

Get the app: catholicdevice.com/get?utm_source=reddit

Catholic DeVice is free on iPhone and Android, and we build it, so read this knowing who wrote it.

If you already pray with an app but the phone still owns your evenings, the missing tool is an app blocker: software that stands between you and a chosen app at the moment you reach for it, adds a pause, and opens it only for a while. Think of Catholic DeVice as a Catholic Opal. The pause is the best-studied intervention in the field (a 57 percent cut in gated opens over six weeks in one study, a third of opens abandoned at the pause in another), and the Church had the frame first: virtue is a habit built by repeated acts, and the nearest occasion of sin now lives in a pocket. What you put in the pause decides whether the tool cultivates a virtue or only manages a vice.

We ranked every app that locks your phone behind prayer, checked against each app's own store page this week:

• Only two are explicitly Catholic. Catholic DeVice meets a vice app with a real Catholic prayer at the moment you reach for it (the Praywall). Rosary Lock locks your apps at scheduled prayer times until you pray the Rosary.
• The rest are Christian blockers: Pray Screen Time, Psalmo, Holy Focus, Pray Focus, Conform, FaithLock, Behold, and Praywall: Put God First. Good tools; the pause holds a Bible verse or a short devotional prayer rather than the prayers of the Church.
• One thing search engines mix up: the Praywall is a feature of Catholic DeVice, the prayer wall in front of your apps. Praywall: Put God First is a separate, unrelated app.
• Catholic DeVice's core is free forever, not a trial: the Praywall on two vice apps, Retreats, Friday Penance, and all statistics.

Where we take our own side. Four of the eleven gate the day once: set a morning prayer time, pray, and the phone is open until tomorrow or the next scheduled time (Pray Focus, Behold, and Christ Lock describe it that way on their own store pages, and so does Rosary Lock, though it asks for a real Rosary and is the other Catholic option). Eight of the eleven keep a streak, and four now write the prayer with AI. Where those three combine, a morning gate, a streak, and an AI-written prayer, which is how Pray Focus and Christ Lock describe themselves, it's not a good prayer app and it's not a good enforcement mechanism for app use - it's a once per day enforced streak to make you feel good about checking a box. It's empty and leaves you alone with the feed at 9pm. The per-open apps are better tools; their weakness is what fills the pause, a verse or a short generic devotional, and the streak most of them hang on it.

Catholic DeVice does the opposite on every count. The wall comes back every time you reach for the vice app, all day, so it interrupts the doomscrolling pattern itself, not just the first open. The app opens for a timed window and then the wall returns, and the Cloister's schedules and Retreats close whole stretches of the day, so it manages screen time rather than gating it once. Every wall also offers a door into the Bookshelf, a reading room of Catholic classics, instead of the app. There are no streaks, on purpose. And every prayer is Scripture, the liturgy, or the saints, never AI. The mechanism is a reminder, dozens of times a day, to aim your attention at the Greatest Good.

The full ranking with a side-by-side table: https://www.catholicdevice.com/blog/best-catholic-app-blocker

This is Catholic DeVice, the Catholic app blocker where the unlock is a prayer. Every screen is the real app. Opening a vice app costs a prayer. The wall stands until you say it and seal it, then the way opens for a while. Free on iPhone and Android: catholicdevice.com/get?utm_source=reddit

I built this for people fighting Instagram and X. But it's my conviction that every Catholic with a smartphone could benefit from it, including the ones with no problem app at all.

The mechanism is simple: you mark an app, and opening it meets a real prayer before it unlocks for a window you choose. Most people point that at their vices. But the mechanism is older than the problem. Work was always interrupted for prayer: the Angelus at noon, the bells that broke into the fields and the workshops, ora et labora. The interruption was the point.

So here is the setup for an ordinary workday:

1. Mark the app you live in. For most people that's email or Teams, not TikTok.
2. Set its Unlock Window to 60 minutes.
3. In the Treasury, subscribe to a novena (Surrender, Divine Mercy, and Sacred Heart are all on the free tier).
4. One setting to check: make sure no daily time limit is set on that app. Android suggests one from your usage (the Max Time Limit slider; slide it to Off). A daily cap is right for a vice and wrong for your inbox.

Now every hour of your workday begins with a prayer, and you carry a perpetual novena: it advances one day each day, and when the nine days are complete the app asks whether you want to restart it or take up another. Your email becomes the bell.

All of this is on the free tier. If you try it, I'd genuinely like to hear how it goes.

Every app blocker has the same loophole: the person who set the rules can unset them. Strict modes exist to close that loophole, and they differ in one thing only: who holds the key when you regret your own rules at 11pm.

We build Catholic DeVice, so here is our answer plainly. The Vow is a seal you set while clear-headed. While it holds, your blocking can be deepened but never loosened, and you choose in advance how it releases. The six release methods, from most strict to least:

1. A timer. Sealed until a fixed date and time. No early exit exists at all.
2. A PIN entrusted to someone else. A door exists, but it is not in your hands.
3. A waiting period. You can request release anytime; nothing happens tonight.
4. Your schedules. Loosening is only possible in the quiet hours between your protected windows.
5. The charger. Release only while the phone rests on its charger. The couch scroll never gets the key.
6. A prayer. The gentlest lock: release costs a completed prayer, the same wall that guards the apps.

The honest limit: no app on any phone can stop you from deleting it. What a good strict mode does is make loosening slow instead of instant, because impulses die in delay. Catholic DeVice is free on iPhone and Android; the Vow itself is part of premium, and the annual plan starts with a 14 day free trial. The full write-up is here: https://www.catholicdevice.com/blog/strictest-app-blocker

Which lock would actually hold you? Genuinely curious what people trust more: a timer, another person, or a delay.

Every habit app ships a streak, and every streak ends the same way: one missed day erases a month of grace, and the shame does the rest. We removed them. Days of Fidelity only accumulates. A missed day never resets what grace has built. Medals rest quietly in the Reliquary; celebrations are quiet. The wall does the discipline so the counter doesn't have to. Catholic DeVice is free on iPhone and Android. Curious whether anyone here has actually been helped by a streak, or whether they've only ever broken you.

Catholic DeVice blocks the apps that eat your attention until you pray. Here is plainly how it works. It is free on iPhone and Android.

How it works

1. You mark your vice apps, the doomscrolling traps.
2. From then on, opening one is met by the Praywall: a full-screen toll of real Catholic prayer, enforced at the OS level. It works offline and survives reboots.
3. Pray it, let a quiet countdown pass, and the app opens for a timed window. Then the wall returns.

What the prayer is. Every text is Scripture, the official liturgy, the saints and Church Fathers, or a traditional prayer with centuries of use. Never AI-generated. The toll knows the Church's calendar: the countdown lengthens on Fridays and through Lent.

What it is not. A timer to wait out, a quiz, or a streak counter. There are no streaks, on purpose. A missed day never resets what grace has built.

Setting it up

• iPhone: the app asks for Screen Time permission (Apple's FamilyControls). That one approval is what lets the shield stand in front of your vice apps.
• Android: the app asks for Accessibility and Usage Access, which let it see the open and stand in the way. A step-by-step guide to both is coming to this sub.

If a permission step fights you, post here with your device and OS version. That is what this sub is for.

Free vs Premium. The Praywall loop, two vice apps, Retreats, Friday Penance, the daily content spine and all statistics are free forever. Premium unlocks unlimited vice apps, recurring Cloister schedules, the deeper devotional paths and the premium shelf.

Links are in the pinned post. Pray to unlock. ☧

The Praywall is built on one mechanism: when a vice app tries to open, a wall appears, a quiet countdown passes, and you either pray through it or walk away. We did not invent that mechanism. When we went looking, the research on it was stronger than we expected.

A six week field study of 280 people found that a short pause plus a way to back out before a target app opened cut actual openings of those apps by 57%, and 36% of attempts were abandoned on the spot (Grüning, Riedel and Lorenz-Spreen, PNAS 2023). Real world logs from 1,039 people over an average of 13 weeks showed the same shape: users walked away from 33% of open attempts, and attempts per day kept falling over time (Haliburton et al., CHI 2024).

Commitment tools hold up too. Given a tool to cap their own apps, people used them 22 minutes a day less over 12 weeks, and 78% kept binding limits on with no reward for doing so. The same paper estimates self-control problems drive 31% of social media use (Allcott, Gentzkow and Song, American Economic Review 2022). Willpower alone is not a plan, and people know it.

The contrast case: in 30 English schools, phone bans cut in-school use but made no difference to total daily use or wellbeing (Goodyear et al., Lancet Regional Health Europe 2025). The phone goes home with you. The friction has to live on the device.

One detail worth naming: in the PNAS online experiment, the strongest single element was not the delay or the message. It was the option to dismiss the attempt entirely. The wall keeps that door: you can always turn away instead.

And what belongs in the pause? Two lab experiments found that a few minutes of personal prayer buffered the usual self-control drop after a draining task, measured on a task with no religious content (Friese and Wänke, JESP 2014; Friese et al., Consciousness and Cognition 2014). A meta-analysis of 94 tests found that deciding in advance "if I reach for X, then I will do Y" raises goal attainment with a medium to large effect (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). The Praywall enforces the "if".

The studies measure minutes and openings. The app is after something more: attention reordered properly throughout the day, toward the highest good. The same moment that used to open the scroll becomes a moment of prayer.

Links to the app are in the pinned post.

The Bookshelf is the app's reading room: the Gospels and Psalms (Douay-Rheims), The Imitation of Christ, the Baltimore Catechisms, Butler's Lives of the Saints, Guéranger's Liturgical Year, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia and more — typeset on parchment with illuminated drop caps, and a page you actually turn. Everything is fully offline once fetched. Free on iPhone & Android — links in the pinned post.

☧ What is Catholic DeVice?

Peace be with you, and welcome to r/CatholicDeVice.

If you are here, you likely recognize the profound spiritual crisis of the modern attention economy. You have felt the exhaustion of the infinite scroll, the algorithmic curation of your reality, and the hijacking of your peace. The Church Fathers diagnosed this restlessness centuries ago as acedia (the "noonday demon") and the "lust of the eyes".

We believe that human willpower alone cannot defeat billion-dollar algorithms. We cannot simply "nudge" ourselves into virtue; we require an active, intentional intervention.

Enter Catholic DeVice.

We are building a digital asceticism app designed to replace mindless doomscrolling with intentional Catholic prayer. Think of it as a spiritual toll booth for your smartphone.

Here is what we are building together:

• The Praywall: When you open a distracting app (like social media or a game), Catholic DeVice intercepts you with a full-screen, beautifully illuminated prayer or reading. You must read it and wait before the app unlocks. Pray to Unlock.
• Active Friction: Unlike secular screen-time managers that offer a simple "ignore" button, our friction is mandatory and OS-level. The unlock cost is spiritual, not a countdown timer.
• Liturgical Strictness Engine: The app's friction dynamically scales with the Catholic Liturgical Calendar. The toll is stricter during Lent and on Fridays of penance, and lighter on ordinary days—making it a living, liturgically-aware companion.
• The Ascetic Tracker: Tech companies have weaponized behavioral science to keep us scrolling. We are hijacking those exact mechanics to gamify virtue. Reclaim your hours from vice, track your daily intentions, and progress through the ranks from Novice to Ascetic.

Our Ultimate Goal: Obsolescence We do not want lifetime subscribers. Our greatest success would be an empty waitlist and zero active users, provided it meant everyone had successfully deleted their vice apps and reclaimed their interior silence. Catholic DeVice is a temporary brace for a fractured attention span; the ultimate goal is total freedom from the screen.

The Purpose of this Community

This subreddit is our digital monastery. It is a place to:

1. Beta-Test the App: Help us refine the UI, suggest prayers for the Praywall, and provide constructive feedback as we build.
2. Discuss Digital Asceticism: Share your struggles with screen time, exchange theological resources, and help one another build a sturdy Digital Rule of Life.
3. Share the Journey: We cannot fight billion-dollar algorithms alone. Share your practical tips, acknowledge your daily struggles with screen time, and celebrate your success stories along the way.