Portal:Roman Catholic Church/box-header/Intro



The Roman Catholic Church or Catholic Church is the Christian Church in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, currently Pope Benedict XVI. It traces its origins to the original Christian community founded by Jesus Christ and led by the Twelve Apostles, in particular Saint Peter.

The Catholic Church is the largest Christian Church and the largest organized body of any world religion. According to the Statistical Yearbook of the Church, the Church's worldwide recorded membership at the end of 2004 was 1,098,366,000 or approximately one in six of the world's population.

The Catholic Church is a worldwide organization made up of one Western or Latin and 22 Eastern Catholic particular Churches, all of which have the Holy See of Rome as their highest authority on earth. It is divided into jurisdictional areas, usually on a territorial basis. The standard territorial unit, each of which is headed by a bishop, is called a diocese in the Latin Church and an eparchy in the Eastern Churches. At the end of 2006, the total number of all these jurisdictional areas (or "Sees") was 2,782.