Terms of Service

The terms that govern your use of Pocket Jesus.

Last updated: 2026-05-27.

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of the Pocket Jesus iOS and Mac applications (the “App”) and the pocketjesus.org website (together, the “Service”). By using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the Service. Section 14 contains an arbitration agreement and class-action waiver that affect how disputes are resolved — please read it carefully.

1. Definitions

  • “We,” “us,” “our” refers to the publisher of Pocket Jesus. You can contact us at support@pocketjesus.org.
  • “You” refers to the individual using the Service.
  • “Content” means questions, prompts, responses, and any other material that passes through the Service.

2. Acceptance of terms

By downloading, installing, or using the App, or by accessing the website, you agree to these Terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the Service.

3. What the Service is

Pocket Jesus is an AI-powered conversational app that responds to your questions with content informed by Catholic teaching and rooted in Vatican tradition. The Service is provided for personal reflection, learning, and spiritual companionship.

The Service is not:

  • An official voice of the Catholic Church, the Holy See, the Vatican, or any diocese, parish, or religious order.
  • A sacrament or substitute for confession, the Eucharist, or any other sacrament.
  • A substitute for pastoral care, spiritual direction, theological education, professional mental-health care, medical advice, legal advice, or any other professional service.

Responses from the App are generated by a machine-learning model. They may contain errors, omissions, or interpretations that differ from official Catholic teaching. You are responsible for forming your own conscience and for seeking out qualified humans for matters of pastoral, mental-health, medical, legal, or other professional concern.

4. Safety, crisis situations, and the limits of this Service

Pocket Jesus is not designed for crisis situations and does not include safety monitoring.

The App runs on a language model that has limited safety guardrails. It does not reliably detect when you are in distress. It does not flag, escalate, or alert anyone if you describe thoughts of harming yourself or others, abuse, or any other crisis. No human is reviewing your conversations on our end.

If you are in crisis, in danger, or thinking about harming yourself or someone else, please reach out to a real person — right now:

  • United States: Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
  • United Kingdom & Ireland: Call 116 123 (Samaritans).
  • Elsewhere: Visit findahelpline.com for local resources, or contact your local emergency number.
  • In immediate danger: Call your local emergency services.

If you wish to speak to a priest, please speak to a priest. Pocket Jesus cannot hear confession, cannot grant absolution, and is no substitute for the sacrament of reconciliation or for pastoral care from a real human minister.

5. Confidentiality and the confessional

Pocket Jesus is not a confessional. Conversations with the App:

  • Are not protected by the seal of confession.
  • Are not protected by clergy–penitent privilege or any equivalent legal privilege.
  • Are not pastoral counseling and do not create a pastoral relationship.

If you wish to confess your sins, please speak to a priest. If you want pastoral counseling or spiritual direction, please speak to a priest, a deacon, a spiritual director, or another qualified human.

We do not store or share the content of your conversations (see Section 11). But the absence of storage on our end is not a substitute for the seal of confession, and your submissions pass through third-party AI infrastructure to generate a response.

6. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If the App Store rates the App at a higher minimum age, that rating controls.

You also represent that:

  • You are not located in a country subject to a US government embargo or designated by the US government as a “terrorist supporting” country.
  • You are not listed on any US government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

7. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

  • Use the Service for any illegal purpose, or in a way that violates these Terms.
  • Use the Service to harass, abuse, defame, or harm others.
  • Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or otherwise extract the underlying model weights, our internal system prompts, configuration, or other proprietary components of the Service. This restriction applies to our internals; it does not apply to your own prompts or to the responses generated for you, which remain yours (see Section 8).
  • Use the Service to generate content that you then misrepresent as the official teaching of the Catholic Church or as the words of any specific person, including any cleric, religious figure, or saint.
  • Scrape, crawl, or extract data from the Service for the purpose of (i) building a competing product, (ii) training or fine-tuning a machine-learning model, or (iii) other commercial exploitation. This restriction does not apply to assistive technologies (screen readers, refreshable braille displays, voice-control software, accessibility audits) used in good faith to make the Service usable by the person operating them.
  • Interfere with or disrupt the Service or its infrastructure.

We may suspend or terminate access to the Service for any user who violates these Terms.

8. Intellectual property

The App, the website, the underlying AI model, our internal system prompts and configuration, and all related software, designs, text, graphics, and trademarks are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by copyright and other intellectual-property laws. You receive a limited, personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to use the Service for its intended purpose.

You retain ownership of the prompts you submit and of the responses generated for you in the App. You grant us a limited, transient license to process your submissions only to the extent necessary to send them to our AI service and return a response to you. User submissions will not be used to train or improve our model without your separate, opt-in consent, and we do not retain them after the response is delivered.

If you believe content in the App infringes your intellectual-property rights, please email support@pocketjesus.org with the details.

9. Your responsibility for your use

You are responsible for what you submit to the Service and for what you do with the responses. If a third party claims you misused the Service or its outputs — for example by publishing AI-generated material as an authoritative statement, infringing someone’s rights, or using the Service to harm them — that claim is between you and them.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the publisher of Pocket Jesus, its officers, employees, agents, and licensors, and (per Section 17) Apple and Apple’s subsidiaries, from any claim, demand, loss, or expense (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) that arises out of your use of the Service in violation of these Terms or in violation of applicable law.

10. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT.

In particular, and without limiting the above:

  • Responses are not religious advice, spiritual direction, professional therapy, medical care, legal advice, or financial advice.
  • We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or theological correctness of any response.
  • We do not guarantee that the Service will be available at any particular time, or that it will be free of errors or interruptions.

11. Privacy

Your use of the Service is governed by our Privacy Policy. In summary:

  • We do not store the content of your conversations with the App.
  • We do not use your submissions to train or improve our model without your separate, opt-in consent.
  • Subscription and billing data is handled by Apple under Apple’s terms; we receive only the anonymized financial reporting necessary to operate the business.
  • For privacy questions, contact support@pocketjesus.org.

Even though we don’t retain conversations, applicable laws — including the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) — may give you rights with respect to how we process your data. We honor those rights to the extent they apply. The Privacy Policy explains the details and how to contact us. Because we don’t retain your conversations, a request to access or delete them will typically be answered “there is nothing to access or delete.”

12. Subscriptions, billing, and ending your use

Some features of the App are available only with a paid subscription. All subscriptions are sold and managed by Apple through the iOS App Store and the Mac App Store, and are subject to the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions.

Subscriptions auto-renew unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You can manage or cancel a subscription:

  • iPhone/iPad: Settings → [Your Name] → Subscriptions.
  • Mac: App Store → [Your Name] → Subscriptions.

We do not separately manage payment for these subscriptions. Refunds are handled by Apple under Apple’s Media Services Terms and Conditions.

You may stop using the Service at any time by deleting the App and canceling any subscription through Apple. Because we do not store conversation content or maintain user accounts on our infrastructure, there is no separate account-deletion process on our end.

13. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL WE BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO YOUR USE OF (OR INABILITY TO USE) THE SERVICE. OUR AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US (IF ANY) IN THE TWELVE MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM OR (B) USD $100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of liability for consequential or incidental damages. In those jurisdictions, our liability is limited to the smallest amount permitted by law.

14. Dispute resolution; arbitration; class-action waiver

Please read this section carefully — it affects your legal rights.

(a) Informal resolution. Before filing a claim, you agree to try to resolve any dispute by emailing support@pocketjesus.org with a description of the dispute and the relief you seek. We will try in good faith to resolve the dispute within 60 days.

(b) Binding individual arbitration. If we cannot resolve the dispute informally, any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved through final, binding individual arbitration administered by JAMS under its applicable rules then in effect. The arbitration will be held in Multnomah County, Oregon, USA; provided that, if you are a US consumer, the arbitration may instead be held at a location convenient to you, by telephone, or by written submission, at your election. The arbitrator’s decision will be final and binding, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

(c) Class-action waiver. You and we each agree that any claim will be brought only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims and may not preside over any form of class proceeding. If this class-action waiver is found unenforceable as to any claim, that claim (and only that claim) is severed from this arbitration agreement and will instead be brought in court under Section 15.

(d) Carve-outs. Nothing in this Section 14 prevents either party from:

  • bringing an individual claim in small-claims court;
  • seeking injunctive or equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction for actual or threatened infringement of intellectual-property rights;
  • exercising any rights under applicable law that cannot be waived by agreement.

(e) 30-day opt-out. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing support@pocketjesus.org within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, including your full name and a clear statement that you wish to opt out of arbitration. Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms.

15. Governing law and venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Oregon, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. To the extent any dispute is not subject to arbitration under Section 14, you and we agree that the exclusive venue will be the state and federal courts located in Multnomah County, Oregon, and each party consents to personal jurisdiction there.

If you are a consumer whose home jurisdiction gives you a non-waivable right to bring claims in your home courts under your home law, this section does not override that right.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we’ll update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, notify you in the App. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

17. Apple-specific terms

If you obtained the App from the iOS App Store or Mac App Store, the following also applies. Apple and Apple’s subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and have the right to enforce them against you.

  • These Terms are between you and us only, not with Apple. We — not Apple — are solely responsible for the App and its content.
  • The license granted to you for the App is limited to a non-transferable license to use the App on any Apple-branded products that you own or control and as permitted by the Usage Rules in the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions.
  • Apple has no obligation whatsoever to provide any maintenance or support services for the App.
  • In the event of any failure of the App to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the App’s purchase price (if any) to you. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Apple has no other warranty obligation whatsoever with respect to the App. Any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs, or expenses attributable to any failure to conform to any warranty will be our sole responsibility.
  • We — not Apple — are responsible for addressing any claims by you or any third party relating to the App or your possession or use of it, including (i) product-liability claims; (ii) any claim that the App fails to conform to any applicable legal or regulatory requirement; and (iii) claims arising under consumer-protection, privacy, or similar legislation.
  • We — not Apple — are responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of any third-party intellectual-property claim that the App or your possession or use of it infringes that third party’s intellectual-property rights.
  • You represent and warrant that (i) you are not located in a country that is subject to a US government embargo or that has been designated by the US government as a “terrorist supporting” country, and (ii) you are not listed on any US government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

18. Miscellaneous

Severability. If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full effect, and the unenforceable provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable while preserving its intent.

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any in-App notices we incorporate by reference, are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service and supersede any prior agreements on the same subject matter.

No waiver. Our failure to enforce any right or provision is not a waiver of that right or provision.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms, in whole or in part, without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of substantially all of our assets, or by operation of law.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for any failure to perform any obligation under these Terms (other than payment obligations) due to causes beyond reasonable control, including acts of God, war, terrorism, riots, embargoes, acts of civil or military authorities, fire, floods, accidents, network or infrastructure failures, strikes, or shortages of transportation, facilities, fuel, energy, labor, or materials.

Electronic notices. You consent to receive communications from us electronically. Notices to you may be sent by email to the address associated with your account (if any) or by posting in the App or on the website. Notices to us must be sent to support@pocketjesus.org.

19. Contact

Questions about these Terms?