Deutscher Caritasverband

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.

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's own audited annual financial statements for the 2024 financial year, independently audited by RSM Ebner Stolz with an unqualified opinion, report total revenue of 237.4 million euros against total expenditure of 222.8 million euros, including 105,879,459.74 euros in aid delivered through Caritas international, the national association's own foreign relief arm.

Read carefully, that figure is narrower than the size of German Caritas as a whole. The statement covers only the Deutscher Caritasverband e.V. central, national headquarters association itself, its own balance sheet and its roughly 470 average annual staff; it explicitly does not consolidate the finances of the wider network of thousands of separately incorporated diocesan Caritas associations, hospitals, care homes and social service providers that together make Caritas one of Germany's largest employers. A headline figure of 237.4 million euros describes the coordinating body Lorenz Werthmann founded in 1897, not the network it now coordinates, and the statement's own scope note is what tells a reader where the boundary between the two actually falls: a national association setting standards for an employer of hundreds of thousands does not need a budget the size of the network it stands over, only a budget adequate to the coordinating and international work that is properly its own.