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Catholic Church: Roman Catholic Church
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The government of the Roman Catholic Church being centred at Rome, an elaborate organization has been developed there for the administration of its affairs. At the head of this is the college of cardinals, who are the princes and senators of the Church, the counsellors of the pope, and his vicars in the functions of the pontificate. By those of them who are members of the various Congregations and other offices of the Curia the greater part of the government of the Church is directed. (For accounts of the organization of the Roman Curia the reader is referred to the articles Cardinal and Curia Romana.) The characteristic note of the Roman Curia is its intense conservatism and its slowness to move, whether in approving or condemning new developments of opinion or action. This is explained by the nature of its organization and by the tradition on which it is based. For, just as the Roman Church as a whole preserves in the spiritual sphere the spirit and much of the organization of the Roman Empire, so the administration of the Curia carries on the tradition of Roman government, with its reverence for precedent and its practice of deciding questions, not on their supposed abstract merits, but in accordance with the rules of law as defined in the codes or by previous decisions.
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The Roman Catholic Church, or Catholic Church, is the Christian church led by the Bishop of Rome, currently Pope Benedict XVI. It traces its origins, via apostolic succession, to the original Christian community founded by Jesus in his act of consecration of Saint Peter, considered by the church and many historians to have been the first pope.[1][2] Alongside its primary mission to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments, the church ... operates numerous social programs, institutions and ministries throughout the world. These include schools, universities, hospitals, and shelters, as well as Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities that help the poor, families, the elderly, the sick and the marginalized.[5]
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The Roman Catholic Church structure is hierarchical, headed by the pope in Rome. Its government is run by the cardinals living in Rome, and is concerned with matters of wide significance. The Church is organized and divided by diocese, with bishop and archbishops, overseeing these territories. With certain restrictions, the pope names the bishops. Dioceses are made up of parishes, each of which has a church and a priest. The pope controls bishops mainly by general legislation.
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[F]rom the early nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth, the experience of the Roman Catholic church in America was shaped less by episcopal preferences than by the fact that it had become the "Church of the Immigrants." The huge influx of Catholics--from Ireland and Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century; from Italy, Poland, and the Balkans between 1880 and 1924; and from Latin America beginning in the 1920s--was the major reason for the church's spectacular growth. It ... defined many of the tasks the church had to assume.
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For 12 years the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a happy solidarity with the White House on the issue of abortion. It was an emblematic alliance of the politics of the 1980's: Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, shoulder to shoulder with cardinals and bishops from Democratic redoubts like New York and Boston, standing firm on the issue that has consumed the church hierarchy in recent years. Now the bishops have a new President, one who carried the Catholic vote last fall, who is a graduate of a Catholic university and who has endorsed much of the social welfare agenda that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has advocated for years. But this President ... chose, as one of his first acts, to begin to roll back 12 years of Republican abortion restrictions, and he has promised to do more.
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The Roman Catholic Church is by far the most widespread, numerous and powerful of all the Christian communions. It is the dominant Church in the majority of European states, in South and Central America and in Mexico; it is the largest single religious body in the United States of America, while in certain Protestant countries, e.g. Prussia and the United Kingdom, it has great religious and political influence. Any statistics of its membership... must necessarily be misleading. Those published are generally based on the principle of deducting the Protestant from the general population of " Catholic " countries and ascribing the rest to the Roman Church. This may be possible in Germany and other countries where there is a religious census; but it is, at best, a rough-and-ready method where, as in Italy or France, besides the class of " political " or " non-practising " Catholics, large numbers of the people are more or less actively hostile to Christianity itself. (For Roman Catholic missionary work see 1'IISSIONs.) The Uniat or United Oriental Churches.
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