This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Catholic Relief Services was founded in 1943 under the name War Relief Services, a purpose stated plainly in its original name: the United States Catholic bishops needed an agency to reach survivors of the Second World War in Europe. That the agency never disbanded once the war ended, but instead renamed itself and kept operating, says something about how the American Catholic hierarchy came to treat international relief, not as an emergency measure to be wound down but as a standing institutional responsibility of the bishops themselves, who still govern CRS today through a board that includes twelve of their number.
From that single wartime mandate, CRS grew into an agency now reporting work in more than ninety countries, spanning emergency relief, agricultural and economic development, health and education programmes. Its own 2024 Annual Report states that CRS and its partners made a difference for nearly 200 million people across more than 95 countries on five continents that year, a scale that places it among the largest faith-based development agencies operating anywhere, Catholic or otherwise.
CRS also occupies a specific place inside a wider Catholic structure: it is the United States' own national member of Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-linked confederation of Catholic relief and development agencies that groups together national bodies such as CAFOD in England and Wales alongside CRS itself. That membership means CRS's work in any given country is rarely freestanding; it typically runs alongside, or in coordination with, the local Caritas member operating in the same territory, one thread in a confederation whose combined membership spans more than 160 national organizations across upward of 200 countries and territories.