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The history of the Catholic Church is the formation, events, and historical development of the Catholic Church through time.. According to the tradition of the Catholic Church, it started from the day of Pentecost at the upper room of Jerusalem; [1] the Catholic tradition considers that the Church is a continuation of the early Christian community established by the Disciples of Jesus.
The Catholic Church teaches that it is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church founded by Jesus. Concerning non-Catholics, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, drawing on the document Lumen gentium from Vatican II, explains the statement "Outside the Church there is no salvation":
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 .
The terms catholic, catholicism, and catholicity are closely related to the use of the term Catholic Church. (See Catholic Church (disambiguation) for more uses.) The earliest evidence of the use of that term is the Letter to the Smyrnaeans that Ignatius of Antioch wrote in about 107 to Christians in Smyrna .
Charity has two parts: love of God and love of man, which includes both love of one's neighbor and one's self. [7] In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul places the greatest emphasis on charity (love). "So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love." He describes it this way:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that faith, hope, and love (charity) "dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. They have God for their origin, their motive, and their object – God known by faith, hoped in, and loved for His own sake." [9]
Catholicity (from Ancient Greek: καθολικός, romanized: katholikós, lit. 'general', 'universal', via Latin: catholicus) [1] is a concept pertaining to beliefs and practices that are widely accepted by numerous Christian denominations, most notably by those Christian denominations that describe themselves as catholic in accordance with the Four Marks of the Church, as expressed in the ...
Stained glass window in a Catholic church depicting St. Peter's Basilica in Rome sitting "Upon this rock," a reference to Matthew 16:18. The Catholic Church teaches that Christ founded only "one true Church", and that this one true Church is the Catholic Church with the bishop of Rome (the pope) as its supreme, infallible head and locus of communion. [8]