One Priest's Coordinating Body, Grown Into a Major Employer's Head Office

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

Deutscher Caritasverband was founded on 9 November 1897 in Cologne by Lorenz Werthmann, a Catholic priest who built the organization on the foundations of Catholic social teaching, the church's developing body of doctrine on economic justice, workers' welfare and the obligations owed to the poor that had been given fresh definition just six years earlier in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Werthmann's founding association was recognised by the German Catholic bishops as their institutional instrument for coordinating charitable work across the country's dioceses, rather than a single congregation's local relief effort.

What began as one priest's coordinating body in Cologne has grown, over more than twelve decades, into the national representative association standing over a network of diocesan Caritas associations, hospitals, care homes and social service providers that today employ hundreds of thousands of people across Germany, among the country's largest employers of any kind. The national association Werthmann founded still sits at the head of that network, setting standards and coordinating the domestic and international work, Caritas international among it, that the wider federation carries out.