The Catholic Church

The Story of the Catholic Church

A warm, simple history of the Catholic Church, from Jesus and the apostles to Cape Town today.

Where it began

The Catholic Church traces its story back about two thousand years to Jesus of Nazareth and the small group of followers he gathered around himself. Twelve of those followers were called apostles, a word that means people who are sent. Catholics believe Jesus gave one of them, a fisherman named Simon Peter, a special role as leader of the group. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells him, “I also tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my assembly, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18, World English Bible). The word translated as assembly there is the word we now know as church.

After Jesus died and, as Christians believe, rose from the dead, the apostles set out to tell the world what they had seen. That first community in Jerusalem is where the Catholic Church says its own story begins. Catholics believe the Pope, who is the bishop of Rome, is the successor of Peter, and that every Catholic bishop today stands in an unbroken line reaching back to the apostles. This idea is called apostolic succession (CCC 861 and 862).

What the word catholic means

Catholic comes from a Greek word, katholikos, which simply means universal, for everyone, everywhere. It was first used to describe the Church around the year 110 by Ignatius, an early Christian bishop from Antioch. The name stuck because it captured the Church’s sense of itself, one family meant for every nation, language and culture.

How the faith spread

The apostles and the first Christians carried the message around the Mediterranean world, often at great personal cost, since the Roman Empire persecuted Christians for almost three hundred years. That changed in the year 313, when the empire made Christianity legal, and the faith then spread quickly.

Christianity in Africa is ancient. There were thriving churches in Egypt and North Africa within the first few centuries. Over the following ages, monks, missionaries and ordinary believers carried the faith across Europe, then to the Americas and Asia, and across the rest of Africa. Today the Catholic Church is the largest single Christian church in the world, and it is growing fastest in Africa.

The split with the Orthodox churches

For its first thousand years, the Church held together as one family with an eastern half and a western half. The two halves slowly grew apart over language, culture and, above all, the question of how much authority the bishop of Rome held over the whole Church. In 1054, leaders in Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other, which means they formally cut each other off from the community. The eastern churches became what we now call the Orthodox churches, and the western church continued as the Catholic Church. In 1965, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras lifted those old condemnations. The two families are not yet fully reunited, but they regard one another as sister churches and keep working toward healing.

The Reformation

In 1517, a German monk and priest named Martin Luther publicly questioned teachings and practices in the Church of his day. Among other things, he objected to abuses around indulgences, promises of God’s mercy that some preachers of the time were offering in exchange for donations, an abuse the Catholic Church itself later condemned. The disagreement widened into deeper questions about authority, the Bible and how people are saved, and it could not be resolved. New Christian communities formed, known as Protestant churches, which is why churches such as the Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Pentecostal churches exist today. The Catholic Church responded with a long season of reform and renewal of its own, centred on the Council of Trent. There was real pain on all sides in that era. Today, Catholics and Protestants increasingly pray, study and serve side by side.

The Church today

The Catholic Church now counts just over 1.4 billion baptised members, about 17.8 percent of everyone on earth, according to the Vatican’s 2026 Pontifical Yearbook, which reports figures for 2024. The Pope leads the Church from Vatican City in Rome. The worldwide Church is organised into dioceses, and a diocese is a regional family of local church communities called parishes, led by a bishop.

The Catholic Church in South Africa

South Africa is a deeply Christian country. In the 2022 census, 85.3 percent of South Africans identified as Christian. The census grouped all Christians together rather than counting denominations one by one, and official surveys and church records place Catholics at roughly 3.8 million people, around 7 percent of the country.

In Cape Town, the local anchor is the Archdiocese of Cape Town, an archdiocese being a senior diocese led by an archbishop. Its roots go back to 1818, when Rome created a mission territory called the Vicariate Apostolic of the Cape of Good Hope, and it became an archdiocese in 1951. Today it serves the city through about 80 parishes, and since March 2026 it has been led by Archbishop Sithembele Sipuka.

What makes Catholic identity distinct

If you grew up around many kinds of churches, here is what makes the Catholic Church recognisably itself.

Sources

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Vatican website About the Archdiocese, Archdiocese of Cape Town How many Catholics are there in the world, Zenit on the 2026 Pontifical Yearbook East West Schism, Wikipedia Reformation, Wikipedia Catholic Church in South Africa, Wikipedia Religion in South Africa, Wikipedia Christianity is changing in South Africa, The Conversation