A Confederation of Catholic Relief Bodies, Founded in 1951

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Caritas Internationalis is a confederation of 162 national Catholic relief, development and social service organizations, headquartered at the Vatican and canonically linked to the Holy See, working across more than 200 countries and territories. Founded in Rome in 1951, it formalized decades of coordinated Catholic charitable work into a single global confederation organized into seven regions, rather than creating a new relief body from nothing, and no single individual is credited as its founder; the confederation exists because national Catholic charities chose to coordinate rather than because one figure willed it into being.

Its member bodies range from small diocesan agencies to some of the world's largest humanitarian organizations, including Catholic Relief Services in the United States and CAFOD in England and Wales, a span that means the confederation's own scale is really the sum of very differently sized national efforts rather than one uniform operation. The confederation is overseen by the Holy See's Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, with a president and secretary general elected by its member organizations' own general assembly, and it coordinates its members' emergency response, development and advocacy work rather than delivering humanitarian aid directly itself.