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Brief History of Roman Catholic

Roman Catholicism is a worldwide religious tradition of some 1.1 billion members. It traces its history to Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant preacher in the area around Jerusalem during the period of Roman occupation, in the early 30s of the Common Era. Its members congregate in a communion of churches headed by bishops, whose role originated with the disciples of Jesus. Over a period of some decades after Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, the bishops spread out across the world to form a "universal" (Greek, katholikos) church, with the bishop of Rome (traced to the apostle Peter) holding primacy. Today Vatican City — and specifically, Saint Peter's Basilica — stands over the grave of Peter, and the pope is considered Peter's successor. Catholic Christianity began as a persecuted religious community, illegal in the Roman Empire in its earliest days, but within some three hundred years and with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, it became legal and eventually was recognized as the official religion of the Empire. With the decline and fall of Rome in the 5th century, the Roman Church assumed both temporal and spiritual authority in the West; it thus had enormous influence on the development of the art and culture of the western world through the Middle Ages. Today, its growth is fastest in Africa, South America, and Asia.

Beliefs

The Hebrew scriptures (usually known to Christians as the Old Testament) and the New Testament lay the basic groundwork for the Catholic understanding of all reality. They show God as the creator of the world and everything in it, including humanity; humans as initially created to live in harmony with God and the world, but breaking that harmony through sin; God's ongoing interaction with humans and his continual call to resume and repair the broken relationship; and a future end of this world, once again fully in harmony with God.

Catholics understand the two major parts of the Bible to be...