pericope

Biblical references for the Roman liturgy: stable book identity, citation parsing and formatting, versification conversion, and liturgical reading selections — references and metadata only, never Bible text.

A pericope (from the Greek perikopē, "a cutting around") is a delimited passage of Scripture forming a coherent unit — in particular the Lectionary's liturgical cutting of a reading, with its precise bounds, omissions, and joins. That cutting is exactly what this library models.

Status: pre-release. The crate is under construction inside the romcal v4 workspace (Phase 3.1). Its contract is the Pericope Model design document; the implementation follows it section by section. Nothing is published yet — this README is the future registry landing text.

This 0.0.1 release is a name reservation — it exports nothing usable.

What it does

• Stable book identity — a semantic, locale-free identifier per book of the Roman Catholic Latin canon (deuterocanonical books included), with explicit adapters planned for OSIS and USFM identifier spaces.
• Semantic references — chapters, verses, ranges, discontinuous selections, verse parts, and liturgical joins (Rm 8, 28-32.35.37-39 is one value, not a string), with set-style coverage comparison.
• Parsing with diagnostics — canonical byte-exact citations and localized citation forms, parsed into the semantic model with stable, source-owned diagnostic codes.
• Formatting profiles — localized book-name sets and citation styles, producing canonical or locale-faithful citations.
• Reference schemes and versification — conversion between numbering traditions, including the dual Hebrew/Septuagint Psalm numbering the Lectionary requires (GILM §119, footnote 123).
• Versioned interchange — a stable JSON/YAML document format (pericope/1 and siblings) for parse, format, conversion, and comparison results.

What it deliberately does not do

• No Bible text. The library and its packaged data carry citations and factual metadata only — never biblical or liturgical text corpora. Text packages remain external and are someone else's copyright decision.
• Not a general Bible-text platform: no concordance, no search engine, no commentary. Non-Catholic canons are outside the initial scope.

Relationship to romcal

pericope is a standalone leaf crate of the romcal workspace: independently buildable and usable, with no dependency on the calendar engine. romcal — the Roman-calendar computation library — is its first consumer, never the other way around.

License

Apache-2.0, like the rest of the romcal workspace.