The Catholic Church, also called the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church in the world. It has over one billion members.
Catholics believe that Jesus Christ started the Catholic Church 2,000 years ago.
The Church’s headquarters are in Vatican City (a small country inside of Rome, Italy).
The word “catholic” means “universal”. Almost half of all Catholics live in Latin America. The continent with the second-largest number of Catholics is Europe.
This map shows the number of Catholics there are in each country.
The Catholic Church is led by the Pope, who is the Bishop of Rome. He lives in Vatican City.
Text adapted from Simple English Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0.
Map by Svenskbygderna from data by Pew Research, image via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0.
