State-of-the art new Catholic dating site

Neil McGee last year in Buenos Aires

If you are looking for new friends and a potential Catholic partner in the UK or Ireland, visit: www.catholiconlinedating.co.uk. Launched in summer 2015, it is attracting hundreds of new members each month. IT specialist Neil McGee describes what led him to set up the state-of-the-art Catholic dating site.

In 2013 I was a typical single Catholic living in London. Like many I originally moved to the city for work with no local Catholic connections, and it took over a year to get involved with a wonderful young adults group in my local parish in Ealing. Balancing difficult work commitments that involved lots of late nights and travel, it was hard to meet as many new people as I would have liked, so I started looking at Catholic online dating.

There's 64 million people living in the UK. Around one in twelve of us are Catholic, so 5.3 million people. If just 10% of those are single, practicing Catholics who are looking to meet someone who shares their faith, then that means there's over half a million people in the UK searching for a Catholic partner. Like me, many of us have moved city to a new community and due to work or other commitments, or perhaps just shyness, are unable to get involved in local Catholic groups. So I thought, surely there would be a website or app to help me to meet someone?

I started by searching on Google. I found some large American Catholic dating websites that looked great but charged a lot and had very few active UK members. What made it worse with some of these was if the person you messaged had just registered for the free trial or their subscription had run out then they would be unable to reply to your message. In the UK there were a few options too, but they looked outdated and more like postal dating agencies than modern dating apps. In the end I just paid to join the largest secular dating site and filtered to 'Catholic' in the religion section, but by the end of my 6 month's registration I hadn't met a single traditional practicing Catholic.

By mid-2014 I felt a deep calling to try something new and live another way of life. I left my IT job in London and moved to the old home of Pope Francis, Buenos Aires. As a Catholic, Argentina is an amazing place to live: beautiful Churches, pilgrimage walks with millions of people, weekly Mass packed full fifteen minutes before starting, potential apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and a deep missionary focus for all to help the poor. Surrounded with this inspiration, I decided to dedicate my skills to creating that Catholic dating website for the UK I was unable to find before.
My 'office' was in the traditionally Jewish neighbourhood of Once and stepping out into the street was a rush of carpet sellers, yellow hooded taxis and families in traditional Jewish dress. With a maté tea in hand, a local caffeine-rich drink, I registered the domain www.catholiconlinedating.co.uk and set out to solve the problem I had found myself in London: I wanted to create a thriving, authentic online community that would allow practicing single Catholics to meet each other across the UK and Ireland.

As a user I had found problems with the existing websites like high fees, restrictions on messaging others, security concerns and outdated looking websites. I created something that was free with no restrictions for genuine users to join and use, which was designed to be used on a smart phone as well as a computer. I used the same level of encrypted secure connection as online banking or social media websites, which you can check by looking for a green padlock in the tool bar, a must before sending personal data online. Along with help from Catholic friends we included features specifically for Catholics - short questions on views on key Catholic issues like abortion or sex outside of marriage, longer open ended questions on Catholic faith, and started to build in listings of local Catholic groups to get involved with. I built in a section which updates with the Daily Readings as I felt easy access to God's Word for you that day would help discernment and offer spiritual guidance, though for me it came in handiest when sitting in Mass in Spanish and trying to understand!

Working full time and using knowledge from my career in IT, I finished the majority of the website development by early 2015 and spent the next few months improving on feedback. In Summer 2015 I came back to the UK and started to spread the website through friends in local church groups. The website started to attract users organically through word of mouth and the number of active users grew dramatically. Now we have over 500 active UK users and up to 50 new registrations every week. We have a process to manually check every new registration to prevent against spam or fake profiles. We help users to delete their profile once they meet someone, although it's really easy to remove your profile yourself from the account section, which helps to prevent outdated user profiles hanging around. Users range from age 18 to 69 and from backgrounds and locations that reflect the rich diversity of the Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland.

For single UK and Irish Catholics who feel called to marriage and put God at the centre of their search, there has never been such a great opportunity to find a like-minded partner online. I'd like to extend a warm invitation for single Catholics to register at www.catholiconlinedating.co.uk and to help us spread the website to Catholic friends and family. Registration is free and takes about 10 minutes, and after we manually verify your profile using techniques to prevent against fake users you can start searching for other users and send direct messages.

For those who have questions or want to get in touch, please send us an email at contact@catholiconlinedating.co.uk, Facebook www.facebook.com/CatholicDatingUK or Twitter www.twitter.com/CatholicDateUK.

Visit Catholic Online Datine here: www.catholiconlinedating.co.uk