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The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.28 to 1.39 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2024. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 9 ] It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions and has played a prominent role in the history and development of Western civilization .
- 19.3%
- 11.0%
- 48.0%
- 20.9%
- Overview
- The emergence of Catholic Christianity
Christianity is an important world religion that stems from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus. Roman Catholicism is the largest of the three major branches of Christianity. Thus, all Roman Catholics are Christian, but not all Christians are Roman Catholic. Of the estimated 2.3 billion Christians in the world, about 1.3 billion of them are Roman Catholics. Broadly, Roman Catholicism differs from other Christian churches and denominations in its beliefs about the sacraments, the roles of the Bible and tradition, the importance of the Virgin Mary and the saints, and the papacy.
Read more below: Christianity: Contemporary Christianity
Roman Catholic Saints
Learn more about the importance of the saints in the Roman Catholic faith.
Who founded Roman Catholicism?
As a branch of Christianity, Roman Catholicism can be traced to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ in Roman-occupied Jewish Palestine about 30 CE. According to Roman Catholic teaching, each of the sacraments was instituted by Christ himself. Roman Catholicism also holds that Jesus established his disciple St. Peter as the first pope of the nascent church (Matthew 16:18). Centuries of tradition, theological debates, and the wiles of history have shaped Roman Catholicism into what it is today.
At least in an inchoate form, all the elements of catholicity—doctrine, authority, universality—are evident in the New Testament. The Acts of the Apostles begins with a depiction of the demoralized band of the disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem, but by the end of its account of the first decades, the Christian community has developed some nascent criteria for determining the difference between authentic (“apostolic”) and inauthentic teaching and behaviour. It has also moved beyond the geographic borders of Judaism, as the dramatic sentence of the closing chapter announces: “And thus we came to Rome” (Acts 28:14). The later epistles of the New Testament admonish their readers to “guard what has been entrusted to you” (1 Timothy 6:20) and to “contend for the faith that was once for all handed down to the holy ones” (Jude 3), and they speak about the Christian community itself in exalted and even cosmic terms as the church, “which is [Christ’s] body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way” (Ephesians 1:23). It is clear even from the New Testament that these catholic features were proclaimed in response to internal challenges as well as external ones; indeed, scholars have concluded that the early church was far more pluralistic from the very beginning than the somewhat idealized portrayal in the New Testament might suggest.
As such challenges continued in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, further development of catholic teaching became necessary. The schema of apostolic authority formulated by the bishop of Lyon, St. Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 200), sets forth systematically the three main sources of authority for catholic Christianity: the Scriptures of the New Testament (alongside the Hebrew Scriptures, or “Old Testament,” which Christians interpret as prophesying the coming of Jesus); the episcopal centres established by the Apostles as the seats of their identifiable successors in the governance of the church (traditionally at Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Rome); and the apostolic tradition of normative doctrine as the “rule of faith” and the standard of Christian conduct. Each of the three sources depended on the other two for validation; thus, one could determine which purportedly scriptural writings were genuinely apostolic by appealing to their conformity with acknowledged apostolic tradition and to the usage of the apostolic churches, and so on. This was not a circular argument but an appeal to a single catholic authority of apostolicity, in which the three elements were inseparable. Inevitably, however, there arose conflicts—of doctrine and jurisdiction, of worship and pastoral practice, and of social and political strategy—among the three sources, as well as between equally “apostolic” bishops. When bilateral means of resolving such conflicts proved insufficient, there could be recourse to either the precedent of convoking an apostolic council (Acts 15) or to what Irenaeus had already called “the preeminent authority of this church [of Rome], with which, as a matter of necessity, every church should agree.” Catholicism was on the way to becoming Roman Catholic.
May 17, 2024 · The Catholic Church is traditionally said to have been founded on Pentecost, the 50th day after its founder Jesus Christ ascended to heaven. On that day, Christ's apostle Peter preached to the "multitudes," people assembled in Rome including Parthians, Medes, and Elamites.
May 1, 2024 · The Roman Catholic Church is an ancient religious institution boasting over a billion members worldwide. As such, it is the largest Christian ecclesiastical body in the world. Because of this alone, it is important to accurately understand the Roman Catholic Church’s history and beliefs.
- Barton Gingerich
May 26, 2024 · The Roman Catholic church based in the Vatican and led by the Pope, is the largest of all branches of Christianity, with about 1.4 billion followers worldwide. Roughly one in two Christians are Roman Catholics and one out of every six people worldwide.
the Church is catholic in a double sense: First, the Church is catholic because Christ is present in her. "Where there is Christ Jesus, there is the Catholic Church."
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Jun 29, 2011 · Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, based in Rome and headed by the Pope, is the oldest institution in the western world.
