The term “catholic” (from a Greek word meaning “universal”) was first used to describe the Church in the early 2nd century, in a letter from Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, to the Christians of Smyrna. He was also one of the earliest Christian writers to stress the Virgin Birth.
In 1054, the Church split in two in the East–West Schism. The Latin-speaking church in Western Europe, which accepted the authority of the Pope, became known as the Roman Catholic Church, while the Greek-speaking churches of the East, which did not accept that the Pope should lead all Christians, became known as the Orthodox Church. The rift had been widening for centuries over papal authority, theology and church customs.
In England under Queen Elizabeth I, following the Reformation, Catholic worship was outlawed. Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services were fined, and priests, along with those who sheltered them, risked execution for treason. Many lost their lives because of their faith.
On September 29, 1568, William Allen, an exiled English Catholic priest, founded a seminary at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands (now in northern France) to train English priests for the Catholic community in England. He hoped to restore Roman Catholicism in his home country and wanted a supply of trained clergy ready for when it was restored. The English translation of the Bible prepared by Allen's college became known as the Douay–Rheims Bible.
Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582 to correct the drift of the old Julian calendar. In the Catholic countries that adopted it straight away, Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday, October 15. Protestant Britain did not switch until 1752.
The "Devil's Advocate" (officially the Promoter of the Faith) was a position within the Catholic Church established in 1587 during the reign of Pope Sixtus V. The Devil's Advocate argued against any proposed sainthood in order to uncover hidden or overlooked flaws. Pope John Paul II scaled back the role in 1983, which helped him canonize more saints than all his predecessors of the previous five centuries combined.
Oliver Cromwell supported freedom of worship for most Protestant groups but excluded Roman Catholics. He welcomed God-fearing believers of many denominations into his army, but not Catholics.
John Southworth was the only Catholic priest executed in England during Cromwell's Protectorate. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on June 28, 1654. His body now lies in Westminster Cathedral.
The Franciscan friar John Wall was executed at Worcester on August 22, 1679, in the wave of persecution that followed the fictitious "Popish Plot". The last Catholic to be executed for his faith in England was Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on July 1, 1681.
In 1757, Pope Benedict XIV gave permission for Catholics to read the Bible in their own languages, provided the translations were approved by the Holy See or accompanied by notes from Catholic scholars.
In England, a 1778 Catholic Relief Act lifted some of the restrictions on Roman Catholics, placing them in the same category as Protestant dissenters. Lord George Gordon formed the Protestant Association to secure the repeal of the act. In June 1780 the violent anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London saw Catholic chapels wrecked, Newgate Prison burned and prisons stormed by mobs drunk on gin from a burning distillery in Holborn.
In 1784 Samuel Wesley, a son of the hymn writer Charles Wesley, became a Catholic. His uncle John Wesley wrote to him, “Whether of this church or that I care not: you may be saved in either, or damned in either; but I fear you are not born again.”
The first free-standing Roman Catholic church built in Britain since the Reformation was St Mary's Chapel at Lulworth Castle in East Lulworth, Dorset, constructed in 1786–87 for Thomas Weld. According to family tradition, George III allowed it on condition that it did not look like a church, so the architect John Tasker designed it to resemble a classical mausoleum or garden building.
The priests of Maryland petitioned Rome for a bishop for the United States. They were allowed to select the city for a cathedral and, on a one-off basis, to name the candidate for presentation to the Pope. In spring 1789 the American clergy chose Father John Carroll as Bishop of Baltimore by a vote of 24 out of 26. On November 6, 1789, Pope Pius VI approved the election, making Carroll the first Catholic bishop in the newly independent United States. He was consecrated on August 15, 1790, in St Mary's Chapel at Lulworth Castle.
Stephen T. Badin, a French Catholic missionary who emigrated to America after the French Revolution, completed his studies at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland. On May 25, 1793, he was ordained by Bishop John Carroll, becoming the first Catholic priest to be ordained in the United States.
In 1787 John Carroll proposed the establishment of a Roman Catholic academy in Georgetown, Maryland (now a part of Washington, D.C.), after the American Revolution allowed for the free practice of religion. Georgetown College, the oldest Catholic university in the United States, dates its founding to January 23, 1789. Future Congressman William Gaston enrolled as the school's first student on November 22, 1791, and instruction began on January 2, 1792.
William Pitt the Younger resigned as British Prime Minister in 1801 after King George III refused to accept Catholic Emancipation. When the king suffered a return of his mental illness shortly afterwards, he blamed Pitt, and Pitt promised never again to raise the issue during the king's lifetime.
Bishop John Carroll oversaw the construction of the first Catholic cathedral in the United States, the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore. It was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, architect of the United States Capitol. Carroll laid the cornerstone on July 7, 1806, but did not live to see its completion.
Work on the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore was completed in 1821. Pope Pius XI raised it to the status of a minor basilica in 1937.
The UK Home Secretary, Robert Peel, steered the Roman Catholic Relief Act through Parliament in 1829 under the Duke of Wellington's government, and it received royal assent on April 13, 1829. It repealed most of the penal laws, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold most public offices. Daniel O'Connell's election for County Clare in 1828 had forced the issue.
On September 29, 1850, Pope Pius IX restored the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, creating the Archdiocese of Westminster and 12 other territorial dioceses. The first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was the celebrated scholar Nicholas Wiseman.
The Knights of Columbus, the world's largest Catholic fraternal service organization, was founded by Father Michael J. McGivney in New Haven, Connecticut, on March 29, 1882. It was named in honor of the mariner Christopher Columbus.
Originally serving as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics in the United States, the Knights of Columbus developed into a fraternal benefit society dedicated to charitable work, promoting Catholic education and Catholic public policy positions, and defending Catholicism in various nations. As of June 30, 2026, there were 2,266,158 Knights, and in the previous year the order welcomed more than 105,000 new members, its biggest growth in over a century.
Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors on December 8, 1864, a list of 80 condemned propositions about the social, political and economic life of the 19th century. This ultra-conservative document attacked liberal forces, condemning many modern ideas such as socialism and secular education, which the Pope associated with secularisation and anti-clericalism. Its final error was the idea that the Pope "can and should reconcile himself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization."
St Joseph's Society for Foreign Missions was founded at Mill Hill in London in 1866 by Herbert Vaughan, later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, to train missionaries to be sent throughout the British Empire. Its members became known as the Mill Hill Missionaries.
The First Vatican Council, which opened in December 1869, was called by Pope Pius IX to deal with the challenges to church authority he perceived in the growth of democracy, socialism, industrialisation and secularism in general. In 1870 it defined the doctrine of papal infallibility.
On becoming Pope, Leo XIII began working to reconcile the Catholic Church with the modern world. In his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, he promoted the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who taught that faith and reason could not truly contradict each other, as the model for Catholic teaching.
In 1961 Pope John XXIII issued an encyclical, Mater et Magistra, in which he sought reconciliation, unity and co-operation between individuals, social groups and nations. For the first time the papacy stressed the need for technologically advanced countries to help emerging nations by sharing their technological skills.
In 1966 the Catholic Church abolished its Index of Forbidden Books, which had existed since the sixteenth century. Its final 1948 edition listed around 4,000 titles, including works by Erasmus, Defoe, Descartes and Immanuel Kant.
A new Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first since 1566, was published by Pope John Paul II in 1992. It was prepared by a commission of 12 cardinals and bishops chaired by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). The document covered Catholic belief about God, the sacraments, prayer and morality based on the Ten Commandments. Newspapers seized on the "new" sins it listed, including drunk driving, tax evasion, genetic manipulation and the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco or medicine.
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II stated in unequivocal terms his opposition to abortion, contraception and euthanasia, and used the church's strongest language to date against capital punishment, saying cases where it was justified were "very rare, if not practically non-existent."
On the first Sunday of the first Lent of Christianity's third millennium, in March 2000, at a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II apologised for the sins of Catholics through history, including "the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth." He declared that the Church "should kneel before God and implore forgiveness for the past and present sins of her sons and daughters."
Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years when he stepped down on February 28, 2013, citing his advanced age. The last pope to resign before him was Gregory XII in 1415.
His successor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina, took the name Pope Francis. He was the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit pope and the first to choose the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi. He died on April 21, 2025, Easter Monday.
In 2018 Pope Francis revised the Catechism to declare that the death penalty is "inadmissible" in all cases.
On May 8, 2025, Cardinal Robert Prevost, born in Chicago, was elected Pope Leo XIV, becoming the first pope from the United States and the first from the Augustinian order.
As of June 30, 2024, there were 1.422 billion baptised Catholics in the world, 17.8% of the global population. This is a dramatic increase from 1950, when there were about 437 million Catholics, and 1970, when there were 654 million.
The 2024 figures showed for the first time that Africa (288.3 million Catholics) had slightly overtaken Europe (287.2 million). The Americas remain home to the most Catholics, with 678.9 million.
Japan has had three Catholic prime ministers: Hara Takashi, Shigeru Yoshida (baptised on his deathbed) and Taro Aso. That's more than the number of Catholic prime ministers of Britain (none while in office) and Catholic presidents of the US (John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden) combined.
The Archdiocese of New York is one of New York City's largest landowners, and has been described as the largest landowner in Manhattan once all its parishes, schools and other properties are counted.
The Catholic Church is the world's largest non-governmental provider of health care. At the end of 2024 it ran 5,397 hospitals, 13,646 dispensaries, 468 care homes for people with leprosy and 8,138 orphanages.
At the end of 2024 the Catholic Church had 407,421 priests worldwide, the first rise in their number in five years.
Sources: Agenzia Fides – Catholic Church Statistics 2026; Knights of Columbus 2026 Annual Report; Lulworth Estate; Catholic Encyclopedia – John Carroll; Holyart
In 1054, the Church split in two in the East–West Schism. The Latin-speaking church in Western Europe, which accepted the authority of the Pope, became known as the Roman Catholic Church, while the Greek-speaking churches of the East, which did not accept that the Pope should lead all Christians, became known as the Orthodox Church. The rift had been widening for centuries over papal authority, theology and church customs.
In England under Queen Elizabeth I, following the Reformation, Catholic worship was outlawed. Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services were fined, and priests, along with those who sheltered them, risked execution for treason. Many lost their lives because of their faith.
On September 29, 1568, William Allen, an exiled English Catholic priest, founded a seminary at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands (now in northern France) to train English priests for the Catholic community in England. He hoped to restore Roman Catholicism in his home country and wanted a supply of trained clergy ready for when it was restored. The English translation of the Bible prepared by Allen's college became known as the Douay–Rheims Bible.
Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582 to correct the drift of the old Julian calendar. In the Catholic countries that adopted it straight away, Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday, October 15. Protestant Britain did not switch until 1752.
The "Devil's Advocate" (officially the Promoter of the Faith) was a position within the Catholic Church established in 1587 during the reign of Pope Sixtus V. The Devil's Advocate argued against any proposed sainthood in order to uncover hidden or overlooked flaws. Pope John Paul II scaled back the role in 1983, which helped him canonize more saints than all his predecessors of the previous five centuries combined.
Oliver Cromwell supported freedom of worship for most Protestant groups but excluded Roman Catholics. He welcomed God-fearing believers of many denominations into his army, but not Catholics.
John Southworth was the only Catholic priest executed in England during Cromwell's Protectorate. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on June 28, 1654. His body now lies in Westminster Cathedral.
The Franciscan friar John Wall was executed at Worcester on August 22, 1679, in the wave of persecution that followed the fictitious "Popish Plot". The last Catholic to be executed for his faith in England was Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on July 1, 1681.
In 1757, Pope Benedict XIV gave permission for Catholics to read the Bible in their own languages, provided the translations were approved by the Holy See or accompanied by notes from Catholic scholars.
In England, a 1778 Catholic Relief Act lifted some of the restrictions on Roman Catholics, placing them in the same category as Protestant dissenters. Lord George Gordon formed the Protestant Association to secure the repeal of the act. In June 1780 the violent anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London saw Catholic chapels wrecked, Newgate Prison burned and prisons stormed by mobs drunk on gin from a burning distillery in Holborn.
In 1784 Samuel Wesley, a son of the hymn writer Charles Wesley, became a Catholic. His uncle John Wesley wrote to him, “Whether of this church or that I care not: you may be saved in either, or damned in either; but I fear you are not born again.”
The first free-standing Roman Catholic church built in Britain since the Reformation was St Mary's Chapel at Lulworth Castle in East Lulworth, Dorset, constructed in 1786–87 for Thomas Weld. According to family tradition, George III allowed it on condition that it did not look like a church, so the architect John Tasker designed it to resemble a classical mausoleum or garden building.
The priests of Maryland petitioned Rome for a bishop for the United States. They were allowed to select the city for a cathedral and, on a one-off basis, to name the candidate for presentation to the Pope. In spring 1789 the American clergy chose Father John Carroll as Bishop of Baltimore by a vote of 24 out of 26. On November 6, 1789, Pope Pius VI approved the election, making Carroll the first Catholic bishop in the newly independent United States. He was consecrated on August 15, 1790, in St Mary's Chapel at Lulworth Castle.
 |
| Portrait of Bishop John Carroll, by Gilbert Stuart |
Stephen T. Badin, a French Catholic missionary who emigrated to America after the French Revolution, completed his studies at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland. On May 25, 1793, he was ordained by Bishop John Carroll, becoming the first Catholic priest to be ordained in the United States.
In 1787 John Carroll proposed the establishment of a Roman Catholic academy in Georgetown, Maryland (now a part of Washington, D.C.), after the American Revolution allowed for the free practice of religion. Georgetown College, the oldest Catholic university in the United States, dates its founding to January 23, 1789. Future Congressman William Gaston enrolled as the school's first student on November 22, 1791, and instruction began on January 2, 1792.
 |
| John Carroll published his proposals for a school at Georgetown in 1787 |
William Pitt the Younger resigned as British Prime Minister in 1801 after King George III refused to accept Catholic Emancipation. When the king suffered a return of his mental illness shortly afterwards, he blamed Pitt, and Pitt promised never again to raise the issue during the king's lifetime.
Bishop John Carroll oversaw the construction of the first Catholic cathedral in the United States, the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore. It was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, architect of the United States Capitol. Carroll laid the cornerstone on July 7, 1806, but did not live to see its completion.
 |
| Carroll lays the cornerstone for the Cathedral of the Assumption in Baltimore |
Work on the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore was completed in 1821. Pope Pius XI raised it to the status of a minor basilica in 1937.
The UK Home Secretary, Robert Peel, steered the Roman Catholic Relief Act through Parliament in 1829 under the Duke of Wellington's government, and it received royal assent on April 13, 1829. It repealed most of the penal laws, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold most public offices. Daniel O'Connell's election for County Clare in 1828 had forced the issue.
 |
| By Issagm at en.wikipedia - Wikipedia Commons |
On September 29, 1850, Pope Pius IX restored the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, creating the Archdiocese of Westminster and 12 other territorial dioceses. The first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was the celebrated scholar Nicholas Wiseman.
The Knights of Columbus, the world's largest Catholic fraternal service organization, was founded by Father Michael J. McGivney in New Haven, Connecticut, on March 29, 1882. It was named in honor of the mariner Christopher Columbus.
Originally serving as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics in the United States, the Knights of Columbus developed into a fraternal benefit society dedicated to charitable work, promoting Catholic education and Catholic public policy positions, and defending Catholicism in various nations. As of June 30, 2026, there were 2,266,158 Knights, and in the previous year the order welcomed more than 105,000 new members, its biggest growth in over a century.
 |
| George W. Bush greets Fourth Degree Knights at the 122nd Annual Convention. |
Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors on December 8, 1864, a list of 80 condemned propositions about the social, political and economic life of the 19th century. This ultra-conservative document attacked liberal forces, condemning many modern ideas such as socialism and secular education, which the Pope associated with secularisation and anti-clericalism. Its final error was the idea that the Pope "can and should reconcile himself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization."
St Joseph's Society for Foreign Missions was founded at Mill Hill in London in 1866 by Herbert Vaughan, later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, to train missionaries to be sent throughout the British Empire. Its members became known as the Mill Hill Missionaries.
The First Vatican Council, which opened in December 1869, was called by Pope Pius IX to deal with the challenges to church authority he perceived in the growth of democracy, socialism, industrialisation and secularism in general. In 1870 it defined the doctrine of papal infallibility.
On becoming Pope, Leo XIII began working to reconcile the Catholic Church with the modern world. In his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, he promoted the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who taught that faith and reason could not truly contradict each other, as the model for Catholic teaching.
In 1961 Pope John XXIII issued an encyclical, Mater et Magistra, in which he sought reconciliation, unity and co-operation between individuals, social groups and nations. For the first time the papacy stressed the need for technologically advanced countries to help emerging nations by sharing their technological skills.
In 1966 the Catholic Church abolished its Index of Forbidden Books, which had existed since the sixteenth century. Its final 1948 edition listed around 4,000 titles, including works by Erasmus, Defoe, Descartes and Immanuel Kant.
A new Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first since 1566, was published by Pope John Paul II in 1992. It was prepared by a commission of 12 cardinals and bishops chaired by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). The document covered Catholic belief about God, the sacraments, prayer and morality based on the Ten Commandments. Newspapers seized on the "new" sins it listed, including drunk driving, tax evasion, genetic manipulation and the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco or medicine.
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II stated in unequivocal terms his opposition to abortion, contraception and euthanasia, and used the church's strongest language to date against capital punishment, saying cases where it was justified were "very rare, if not practically non-existent."
On the first Sunday of the first Lent of Christianity's third millennium, in March 2000, at a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II apologised for the sins of Catholics through history, including "the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth." He declared that the Church "should kneel before God and implore forgiveness for the past and present sins of her sons and daughters."
Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years when he stepped down on February 28, 2013, citing his advanced age. The last pope to resign before him was Gregory XII in 1415.
His successor, Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina, took the name Pope Francis. He was the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit pope and the first to choose the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi. He died on April 21, 2025, Easter Monday.
In 2018 Pope Francis revised the Catechism to declare that the death penalty is "inadmissible" in all cases.
On May 8, 2025, Cardinal Robert Prevost, born in Chicago, was elected Pope Leo XIV, becoming the first pope from the United States and the first from the Augustinian order.
As of June 30, 2024, there were 1.422 billion baptised Catholics in the world, 17.8% of the global population. This is a dramatic increase from 1950, when there were about 437 million Catholics, and 1970, when there were 654 million.
The 2024 figures showed for the first time that Africa (288.3 million Catholics) had slightly overtaken Europe (287.2 million). The Americas remain home to the most Catholics, with 678.9 million.
Japan has had three Catholic prime ministers: Hara Takashi, Shigeru Yoshida (baptised on his deathbed) and Taro Aso. That's more than the number of Catholic prime ministers of Britain (none while in office) and Catholic presidents of the US (John F. Kennedy and Joe Biden) combined.
The Archdiocese of New York is one of New York City's largest landowners, and has been described as the largest landowner in Manhattan once all its parishes, schools and other properties are counted.
The Catholic Church is the world's largest non-governmental provider of health care. At the end of 2024 it ran 5,397 hospitals, 13,646 dispensaries, 468 care homes for people with leprosy and 8,138 orphanages.
At the end of 2024 the Catholic Church had 407,421 priests worldwide, the first rise in their number in five years.
Sources: Agenzia Fides – Catholic Church Statistics 2026; Knights of Columbus 2026 Annual Report; Lulworth Estate; Catholic Encyclopedia – John Carroll; Holyart
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