Annuario Pontificio

The red-covered yearbook, compiled by the Central Office of Church Statistics and published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, is mostly in Italian. The 2015 edition had more than 2,400 pages and cost €78.

According to the Pontifical Yearbook of 2022, the number of Catholics in the world increased to 1,359,612,000 at the end of 2020.

History

A yearbook of the Catholic Church was published, with some interruptions, from 1716 to 1859 by the Cracas printing firm in Rome, under the title Information for the Year ... (Italian: Notizie per l'Anno ...) From 1851, a department of the Holy See began producing a different publication called Hierarchy of the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church Worldwide (Italian: Gerarchia della Santa Chiesa Cattolica Apostolica Romana in Tutto L'Orbe), which took the title Annuario Pontificio in 1860 but ceased publication in 1870. This was the first yearbook published by the Holy See itself, but its compilation was entrusted to the newspaper Giornale di Roma. The Monaldi Brothers (Italian: Fratelli Monaldi) began in 1872 to produce their own yearbook entitled The Catholic Hierarchy and the Papal Household for the Year ... (Italian: La Gerarchia Cattolica e la Famiglia Pontificia per l'Anno ...).

The Vatican Press took over the Gerarchia Cattolica in 1885, thus making it a semi-official publication. It bore the indication "official publication" from 1899 to 1904, but this ceased when, giving the word "official" a more restricted sense, the Acta Sanctae Sedis, forerunner of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, was declared the only "official" publication of the Holy See. In 1912, it resumed the title Annuario Pontificio. From 1912 to 1924, it included not only lists of names, but also brief illustrative notes on departments of the Roman Curia and on certain posts within the papal court, a practice to which it returned in 1940.

For some years, beginning in 1898, the Maison de la Bonne Presse publishing house of Paris produced a similar yearbook in French called Annuaire Pontifical Catholique, not compiled by the Holy See. This contained much additional information, such as detailed historical articles on the Swiss Guards and the Papal Palace at the Vatican.