feat: mint canonical IDs for circumscription types (ctype:)

[JohnRDOrazio]

Makes type a canonicalized cross-reference rather than a free string.

Until now the type enumeration existed only as prose in docs/schema-proposal.md — fourteen snake_case tokens in a parenthesis. This mints them as canonical IDs in a companion registry, data/circumscription_types.json, so a circumscription's type resolves to an entry with its own identity, Latin name, and juridic basis.

Why a cross-reference

It is what the family already does. COECDR embeds CRPDR rp: IDs in its Reigning pontiff column; CDOCTDR embeds CRMEDR mr: IDs for eulogies. An entry now reads:

{
  "id": "circ:us-boston",
  "name": "Archdiocese of Boston",
  "nation": "US",
  "church_sui_iuris": "latin",
  "type": "ctype:archdiocese"
}

The sixteen types

Covering exactly the scope the README already claims, plus two the schema proposal's open question 5 raises:

ID	Latin	church	territorial	governed by
ctype:diocese	dioecesis	latin	✓	diocesan bishop
ctype:archdiocese	archidioecesis	latin	✓	archbishop
ctype:eparchy	eparchia	eastern	✓	eparchial bishop
ctype:archeparchy	archieparchia	eastern	✓	archeparch
ctype:exarchate	exarchatus	eastern	✓	exarch
ctype:apostolic-exarchate	exarchatus apostolicus	eastern	✓	apostolic exarch
ctype:territorial-prelature	praelatura territorialis	latin	✓	prelate
ctype:territorial-abbacy	abbatia territorialis	latin	✓	abbot
ctype:apostolic-vicariate	vicariatus apostolicus	latin	✓	vicar apostolic
ctype:apostolic-prefecture	praefectura apostolica	latin	✓	prefect apostolic
ctype:apostolic-administration	administratio apostolica	both	✓	apostolic administrator
ctype:mission-sui-iuris	missio sui iuris	latin	✓	ecclesiastical superior
ctype:military-ordinariate	ordinariatus militaris	both	✗	military ordinary
ctype:personal-ordinariate	ordinariatus personalis	latin	✗	ordinary
ctype:personal-prelature	praelatura personalis	latin	✗	prelate
ctype:ordinariate-for-eastern-faithful	ordinariatus pro fidelibus ritus orientalis	eastern	✗	ordinary

Each entry also carries juridic_reference — CIC can. 369 for a diocese, can. 370 for territorial prelatures and abbacies, can. 371 §1 and §2 for the missionary forms, can. 294–297 for personal prelatures, CCEO can. 177 and 311 for the Eastern forms, Spirituali Militum Curae (1986) and Anglicanorum coetibus (2009) for the two ordinariate forms — and a note recording what distinguishes it.

Two entries carry "juridic_reference": null deliberately: ctype:mission-sui-iuris and ctype:ordinariate-for-eastern-faithful. Neither is defined in the 1983 Code; both are recognized in the Annuario and in practice. Null is honest here, and marks the citation as outstanding rather than implying none exists.

The territorial flag makes the personal structures legible as a class — it is the property that makes rule 5 necessary, and the reason circ:int-opus-dei has no nation.

Enforcement

generate_seed.py now asserts that every type resolves against the types registry:

AssertionError: unknown circumscription types: ['ctype:bogus-type']

Verified by injecting a bad value: the generator exits 1 rather than shipping an unresolvable reference. The existing duplicate-ID assertion is unchanged. data/circumscriptions.json changes by exactly one line — Opus Dei's personal_prelature becomes ctype:personal-prelature, the only typed entry in the seed.

Three new open questions

Added to docs/schema-proposal.md:

5. (amended) Ordinariates for Eastern faithful and apostolic exarchates are now provisionally minted, so the question can be decided against concrete entries rather than in the abstract.
6. English or Latin identifiers? ctype:territorial-abbacy as minted, or ctype:abbatia-territorialis following CDOCTDR's use of the Latin lemma. Latin would be language-neutral and match the Annuario; English matches the enumeration this repository already documented. name_la is carried either way, so this is about the identifier alone.
7. Patriarchal and major archiepiscopal sees. Presently archeparchies, with the dignity of the church sui iuris carried by church_sui_iuris. The Annuario lists them distinctly; whether they warrant their own type IDs is unsettled.

Note on merging

This adds open questions 6 and 7. #1 also adds a question numbered 6. Whichever lands second needs renumbering — a trivial conflict, but worth knowing about rather than discovering.

Relation to open issues

This is the data #7 is blocked on: with type populated, the per-type registry tables become producible. It also gives #3 (ctype:territorial-abbacy), #4 (ctype:military-ordinariate), #5 (ctype:personal-ordinariate) and #6 (ctype:apostolic-prefecture) a value to assign as each is resolved.

Populating type across the other 2,934 entries remains a separate authoritative pass against the Annuario, as docs/schema-proposal.md § "Seed and its limits" already records.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Summary by CodeRabbit

• New Features

  • Added a canonical registry of 16 ecclesiastical circumscription types with English and Latin names, applicability, territoriality, leadership, references, and notes.
  • Introduced standardized ctype: identifiers for circumscription types.

• Data Updates

  • Updated the Opus Dei entry to use the new personal prelature identifier.
  • Added validation to ensure all listed types are recognized.

• Documentation

  • Documented the registry, type resolution, schema changes, and outstanding classification questions.

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 3dac1af and 8bd972c.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• data/circumscription_types.json
• docs/schema-proposal.md

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The change adds a 16-entry circumscription type registry, defines ctype:<slug> identifiers, updates existing type references, documents registry resolution, and validates populated entry types during seed generation.

Changes

Circumscription type cross-reference

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Canonical type registry and schema contract data/circumscription_types.json, docs/schema-proposal.md, README.md	Defines the ctype:<slug> format, registry metadata, 16 type records, cross-registry conventions, and related taxonomy questions.
Canonical identifier migration data/circumscriptions.json, scripts/generate_seed.py	Changes the Opus Dei type reference to ctype:personal-prelature. The schema example uses ctype:archdiocese.
Seed registry validation scripts/generate_seed.py	Loads the type registry and fails seed generation when a populated entry uses an undefined type identifier.

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the main change: introducing canonical ctype: IDs for circumscription types.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

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• Commit unit tests in branch feat/circumscription-types

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[JohnRDOrazio]

Corrected in 3dac1af: ctype:territorial-abbacy is both, not latin.

The Abbazia territoriale di Santa Maria di Grottaferrata is of Byzantine rite — one of the three circumscriptions of the Chiesa bizantina cattolica in Italia, alongside the eparchies of Lungro and Piana degli Albanesi, and still active under its own ordinary. The territorial abbacy is not a Latin-only form.

Worth recording why the error happened, because it generalizes. church states which churches are known to use each form. That is an empirical claim, answerable only by enumerating real circumscriptions — and the seed is Latin-rite only. All three Italo-Albanian circumscriptions are absent from it, so nothing in this repository could have contradicted the wrong classification.

The remaining latin entries — territorial prelature, apostolic vicariate, apostolic prefecture, mission sui iuris, personal prelature — were classified the same way and carry the same risk. They should be treated as unverified until checked against the Annuario, and I have not verified them.

That is now open question 8, and the file's $comment warns that a form marked latin may prove to be both once Eastern circumscriptions land.

Revised counts: latin 8, eastern 5, both 3.

[JohnRDOrazio]

Verification pass on the remaining latin values — 8bd972c. One more correction, and a limitation worth stating up front.

Corrected

ctype:apostolic-vicariate → both. The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church had two Byzantine-rite apostolic vicariates: Macedonia (Thessaloniki) and Thrace (Adrianople), both erected 1883, both suppressed 1926 into the Apostolic Exarchate of Sofia. None is currently active — the standing Eastern equivalent is the apostolic exarchate — but rule 3 keeps suppressed circumscriptions referenceable forever, so the form has to remain typable for a Byzantine circumscription. The historical scope this registry commits to is what makes latin wrong here.

Checked and unchanged

Catholic-Hierarchy's structured view of the Byzantine tradition shows only five type labels in use: eparchy, archeparchy, apostolic exarchate, apostolic administration, territorial abbey. No diocese, no archdiocese, no apostolic vicariate, no apostolic prefecture.

type	verdict	basis
ctype:diocese	latin holds	Eastern equivalent is eparchy throughout
ctype:archdiocese	latin holds	Eastern equivalent is archeparchy throughout
ctype:territorial-prelature	latin holds	no Eastern instance found
ctype:apostolic-prefecture	latin holds	no Eastern instance found, current or historical
ctype:mission-sui-iuris	latin holds	all 8 are Latin; term not used in the Eastern churches
ctype:personal-prelature	latin holds	Opus Dei only
ctype:personal-ordinariate	latin holds	3, all Anglicanorum coetibus

Two incidental confirmations of values I had not been asked to check: ctype:apostolic-administration as both is right — Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and Belarus, are Byzantine — and ctype:ordinariate-for-eastern-faithful corresponds to real entities, the Ordinariate for Byzantine-Rite Catholics in Austria and the Ordinariate for Catholics of Armenian Rite in Eastern Europe.

The limitation

I did not verify against the Annuario Pontificio. It is not available online, and I have no copy. What I checked was Catholic-Hierarchy plus per-form surveys — the verification aids the README already names as not authorities.

That matters asymmetrically. The two corrections rest on positive findings, which are solid: one Byzantine abbacy and two Byzantine vicariates each definitively prove both. The seven that held rest on absence of evidence, which is weaker — particularly for suppressed Eastern circumscriptions, where these sources' coverage is uneven. A single overlooked historical jurisdiction would flip any of them the way Grottaferrata flipped the abbacy.

Open question 8 is rewritten to say this rather than to imply the field is now settled. Revised counts: latin 7, eastern 5, both 4.