It is written: “You will know them by their fruits.”[1]
I frequently encounter people who maintain a constant, destructive criticism of the Catholic Church. They tend to highlight only negative things; most of the time they end up creating a black legend far removed from reality, which is then passed on to others, who enter a kind of vicious cycle in which they begin doing the same. That is why I have wanted to write just a few lines in which I intend to highlight some (among many) of the good things the Church has done and continues to do for humanity.
If you are one of those who sees only bad things in the Church, I invite you to take some time to review these lines, to investigate whether what is said here is true, and then sincerely ask yourself whether the image you have of the Church corresponds to reality.
And if you are a Catholic who must frequently face the criticism of your anti-Catholic friends and acquaintances, I also invite you to read them; you will thus be able to help them gain a clearer perspective and come out of their error.
The Church’s Good Works Today
I have drawn from Agenzia Fides[2] the most recent figures, taken from the “Statistical Yearbook of the Church” and published in October 2025 (with data consolidated as of December 31, 2023).
The Catholic Church in Africa
On this continent the Church maintains:
21,091 Nursery Schools
45,206 Primary Schools
18,392 Secondary Schools
1,634 Hospitals
4,973 Dispensaries
189 Leprosaria
652 Homes for the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities
1,151 Orphanages
The Catholic Church in the Americas
On this continent the Church maintains:
15,474 Nursery Schools
21,213 Primary Schools
11,765 Secondary Schools
1,391 Hospitals
3,520 Dispensaries
38 Leprosaria
3,405 Homes for the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities
2,127 Orphanages
The Catholic Church in Asia
On this continent the Church maintains:
14,060 Nursery Schools
16,273 Primary Schools
11,629 Secondary Schools
1,166 Hospitals
2,449 Dispensaries
257 Leprosaria
2,620 Homes for the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities
2,906 Orphanages
The Catholic Church in Europe
On this continent the Church maintains:
22,445 Nursery Schools
15,671 Primary Schools
9,539 Secondary Schools
960 Hospitals
2,397 Dispensaries
20 Leprosaria
8,515 Homes for the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities
2,284 Orphanages
5,092 Marriage Counseling Centers
The Catholic Church in Oceania
On this continent the Church maintains:
1,480 Nursery Schools
4,092 Primary Schools
760 Secondary Schools
226 Hospitals
556 Dispensaries
374 Homes for the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities
125 Orphanages
In total, the Church administers worldwide 74,550 nursery schools (with 7.6 million pupils), 102,455 primary schools (36.2 million pupils), and 52,085 secondary institutes (20.7 million pupils). In addition, the Church accompanies more than 2.6 million young people in higher institutes and 4.4 million university students.
The charitable and assistance institutes administered worldwide by the Church total 103,951 centers, which include:
5,377 Hospitals
13,895 Dispensaries
504 Leprosaria
15,566 Homes for the Elderly, the Chronically Ill, and Persons with Disabilities
8,593 Orphanages
10,858 Crèches and Kindergartens
10,827 Marriage Counseling Centers
3,147 Social Education or Re-education Centers
35,184 Institutions of Other Kinds (soup kitchens and shelters)
It is particularly noteworthy that of all persons infected worldwide with HIV/AIDS, approximately 25 percent are cared for by some institution of the Catholic Church, making it the most important institution at the global level in this area. This percentage increases in the case of Africa, where the Church cares for nearly 50 percent of those affected by this plague. In an interview granted to the multimedia platform of the organization Aid to the Church in Need, Wheregodweeps.org, Fr. Michael Czerny, founder of the African Jesuit AIDS Network, specifies that in some places far from the major cities, the number of persons suffering from this disease who are cared for by the Church reaches even 100 percent.
For further details one may consult the Statistics of the Catholic Church 2025 – Agenzia Fides.
Some Catholic Organizations and Movements
It is impossible to compile in a single article all Catholic organizations and movements, and so this partial listing is only a small sample.
Caritas Internationalis
Caritas Internationalis is a confederation of 162 Catholic relief, development, and social service organizations, working to build a better world for the poor and oppressed in more than 200 countries and territories.
Caritas works without regard to the creed, race, gender, or ethnicity of its beneficiaries, and is one of the largest humanitarian networks in the entire world.
Caritas’s mission is rooted in the Social Doctrine of the Church, centering on the dignity of the human person. Caritas’s work for the poor manifests God’s love for all creation. Caritas believes that the poor and oppressed must not be objects of pity, but agents of change, in the struggle to eradicate dehumanizing poverty, unacceptable living and working conditions, and unjust social, political, economic, and cultural structures.
What makes Caritas unique is its constant presence in communities before, during, and after crises.
Caritas combats poverty, exclusion, intolerance, and discrimination. Most importantly, it enables the poor to participate fully in all matters that affect their lives, and advocates for them in national and international forums.
Missionaries of Charity
The Missionaries of Charity are a Catholic religious order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 1950, whose purpose is to help the poorest of the poor. It currently has approximately 4,500 sisters in more than 133 countries, who take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience together with a fourth vow of free and wholehearted service to the poorest of the poor.
The Missionaries of Charity Brothers were founded in 1963, and a contemplative branch of the Sisters was established in 1976. In 1984 Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity Fathers together with Father Joseph Langford.
The Missionaries assist refugees, former prostitutes, the mentally ill, abandoned children, lepers, AIDS victims, the elderly, and the convalescent. They run schools staffed by volunteers to educate street children and soup kitchens, and they provide other services according to the needs of the community. In Calcutta alone there are 19 houses that shelter needy men and women, orphaned children, AIDS patients, a school for street children, and a leper colony. These services are provided to people without regard to their religion.
Salesians of Don Bosco
The Salesian work throughout the world seeks to render a service to poor, abandoned, and at-risk young people, following the path taken in the late nineteenth century in northern Italy by Saint John Bosco, more popularly known as “Don Bosco.”
Don Bosco felt the call to live out this vocation through priestly service and gradually tried out various initiatives on behalf of these young people, who had been hit hard by the growing industrialization of the era. Thus, the works he undertook ranged from direct assistance — providing food, housing, and clothing — to integral promotion, organizing schools and centers for care, prevention, and recreation; in this way “the work of Don Bosco” was born.
In 1888, the year of Don Bosco’s death, there were 773 Salesians and 276 novices. Today the Salesians number 16,568 and are present in 128 nations, the top five by number of Salesians being Italy (2,669), India (2,261), Spain (1,297), Poland (1,025), and Brazil (799). They maintain a vast network of works including schools, youth centers, parishes, centers for street children, missionary centers, and cooperation with official and non-governmental organizations for the benefit of the neediest young people. The Salesian Family is made up of a large number of institutes, both religious and lay, the principal ones being the Society of Saint Francis de Sales, the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, the Association of Salesian Cooperators, and the Association of Salesian Past Pupils.
Fe y Alegría
Fe y Alegría is a “Movement of Integral Popular Education and Social Promotion” whose action is directed toward impoverished and excluded sectors in order to strengthen their personal development and social participation. It was born in Venezuela on March 5, 1955, when the doors of the first Fe y Alegría school opened in a marginalized neighborhood on the west side of Caracas, thanks to the generosity of Abraham Reyes, a humble bricklayer who donated his own home to welcome the children of the area. Thus began the evolution of what is today the “International Movement of Integral Popular Education and Social Promotion Fe y Alegría.”
The Movement later spread to Ecuador (1964), Panama (1965), Peru (1966), Bolivia (1966), El Salvador (1969), Colombia (1971), Nicaragua (1974), Guatemala (1976), Brazil (1980), Dominican Republic (1990), Paraguay (1992), Argentina (1995), Honduras (2000), Chile (2004), and Haiti (2006). In 1985 Fe y Alegría was established in Spain as a platform of support for Latin American countries and as a vehicle for spreading the Movement’s work in Europe; since 1999 its mission has been redefined to take on new challenges in the field of development cooperation, under the name Fundación Entreculturas-Fe y Alegría. There are now 17 countries where national Fe y Alegría organizations operate as members of the International Federation. In addition, Italy hosts an extension of the Radio Institute (IRFEYAL) of Ecuador.
By 2006, the number of students and participants served reached 1,364,077. The figure excluding those registered in more than one program is 938,458. It operates through a network of 1,603 locations in which 2,796 service units function: 1,135 are schools, 56 radio stations, 506 distance education centers, and 905 alternative education centers and services. Fe y Alegría employs 37,909 people, 97.7% laypersons and 2.3% members of religious congregations. This figure does not include the hundreds of volunteer collaborators in the various countries.
The number of people reached by the Movement’s action could well be around seven million per year. In addition to formal schooling at the preschool, primary, and secondary levels, space has been opened for other forms of human promotion, such as: radio stations, adult education programs, job training and school reintegration, vocational training at the intermediate and higher university levels, the fostering of cooperatives and microenterprises, as well as community development, health, indigenous culture, teacher training, and the production of educational materials, among others.
Manos Unidas
Manos Unidas is a Catholic volunteer non-governmental development organization (NGDO) that since 1960 has been fighting against poverty, hunger, malnutrition, disease, lack of education, underdevelopment, and their root causes. It was born as a one-time campaign against hunger and from 1978 onward acquired full legal, canonical, and civil status as an organization, taking the name “Manos Unidas.” To fulfill its objective it funds development projects in countries of the South and carries out awareness campaigns in Spain.
In 2008 alone it approved 774 development projects in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania (see Manos Unidas Projects 2008).
Legion of Mary
The Legion of Mary is an apostolic organization of lay people in the Catholic Church with more than 10 million active members and millions of auxiliary members worldwide; it was founded in Dublin, Ireland, on September 7, 1921. The Legionary prayers are now recited in 125 different languages. It has been approved by the last 6 Popes and was endorsed by the Second Vatican Council.
It operates through weekly group meetings in which prayer is offered, apostolic activity is reviewed, and formative topics are studied in order to make the apostolate more effective. The groups are mixed, comprising about 12 members led by 4 laypeople and a priest. There are groups for adults from the age of 18 onward. For minors there are seedling groups (children 5 to 10 years old), junior groups (11 to 14 years old), and intermediate groups (15 to 18 years old).
Part of their apostolate consists in carrying out a specific apostolic work each week, lasting a minimum of two hours and done in the company of another Legionary, among which are:
Visits to the sick, the elderly, the disabled, the imprisoned, those infected with AIDS, drug addicts, etc.
Distribution of Catholic newspapers and books. Mobile bookstalls.
Literacy campaigns and cultural classes.
Formation of liturgical teams.
Visits to children in shelters and hospitals.
Street contact work in streets and parks.
Talks on Natural Family Planning: the Billings Ovulation Method.
Contact with persons about to procure an abortion.
The Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God
The Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God began in 1539, when one man rented a house in Granada to take in the sick and the destitute whom no one else cared for. When he died in 1550 his followers carried on the work, and Saint Pius V constituted them a religious order in 1572. Its founder, canonized in 1690, is the patron of hospitals and of the sick.
It is today the largest Catholic care network in the world devoted to health. According to the Order’s own figures, it runs around 400 centers—hospitals, mental health centers, residential homes, services for the homeless and for persons with disabilities—spread across the five continents, with close to a thousand brothers, some 65,000 professionals, and more than 6,000 volunteers, and it cares for about 2.6 million people a year.
In Peru it maintains a network of clinics devoted in large part to children with disabilities and to rehabilitation, with centers in Lima, Arequipa, and Cusco. Almost five centuries after that rented house, its works still stand under the motto of the Order: “Do good, brothers.”
The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul
The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul is an international organization of lay people devoted to the direct service of the poor. It was founded in Paris on April 23, 1833, by seven young men, among them a student who turned twenty that very day, Frédéric Ozanam. Its method has not changed in nearly two centuries: small groups, called “conferences,” that visit the needy families of their neighborhood personally, in their own homes.
Today it is present in more than 150 countries and numbers, according to its own figures, some 800,000 members and close to a million and a half volunteers. Ozanam went on to become a professor at the Sorbonne and is regarded as a forerunner of the social doctrine of the Church; he was beatified by John Paul II in Paris on August 22, 1997, during World Youth Day.
The Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick
The Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, are a religious congregation founded in Madrid on August 15, 1851, by the priest Miguel Martínez y Sanz together with Saint María Soledad Torres Acosta, who took the habit that same day along with six companions. Their charism is an uncommon one: they do not wait for the sick in a hospital but go to watch over them in their own homes; they do this for the sick who have no means, and they accompany them as well in preparing for a good death.
They were born to care for the sick poor of the neighborhoods of Madrid, and since then they have carried that same home care to some twenty countries on four continents, Peru among them. Saint María Soledad was beatified by Pius XII in 1950 and canonized by Paul VI in 1970.
The Catholic Church and Its Contribution to Civilization
The contribution throughout history to art, music, architecture, science, law, and economics is undeniable. The historian Thomas Woods, in his book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, delves deeply into the legacy of Christianity, today often unknown or denied. He concludes that when studying Western civilization and its institutions, these have not been the fruit of a chance and scattered evolution. Starting from the heritage of Greece and Rome, they were born within a Christian cultural matrix which, together with the inevitable human failings, has represented a decisive civilizing work.
Following the history of the Catholic Church, Woods demonstrates in monographic chapters the contributions it has made to Western culture: the civilizing labor of the monasteries in the Middle Ages, the birth of the universities, the marvels of cathedral art, the development of experimental science from the late Middle Ages onward, the origins of International Law, the precedents of the modern economy in the School of Salamanca, the development of charitable works when no one was concerned for the poorest, the progressive eradication of many inhumane practices… Taken as a whole, one sees how faith has been an inspiring source of initiatives and energies for doing good.
This is a small sample of some things that we all should take into account before making negative value judgments about the Catholic Church.
