(July 09, 2011) A book of maps and information on the statistics of the Church now
in its sixth edition, with a 100-year history, known as The Atlas Hierarchicus, was
presented to Pope Benedict XVI by Archbishop Fernando Filoni, prefect of the Congregation
for the Evangelization of Peoples, on Wednesday. The work is published by the Pontifical
Urbanian University, with a prologue by the Pope. It contains detailed statistics
of the Church on the five continents, as well as the dioceses and ecclesiastical circumscriptions
that have been created in recent years. The work is financed by the Congregation for
the Evangelization of Peoples. Its objective is not so much to provide data but above
all to offer an overall vision -- current and geographic -- of the Church in the world.
The most recent previous edition had been produced in 1992. The first Atlas was made
by Karl Streit of the Divine Word Congregation in 1913. This Dutch religious, who
in 1906 did an atlas on Catholic missions in the world, gave Pope Pius X a copy of
the first Atlas Hierarchicus. It was made, as the author himself explained in the
preface, with the best cartographic resources of the time. This first Atlas was written
in five languages: German, Spanish, English, French and Italian, and was printed in
Padernborn, Germany. It was presented to the Pope as a tribute in the Jubilee Year
of 1913, on the 16th centenary of the Edict of Milan.