Aid To The Church in Need

Aid to the Church in Need (Kirche in Not in German, Aiuto alla Chiesa che Soffre in Italian) describes itself as "an international pastoral aid organization of the Catholic Church, which yearly offers financial support to more than 5,000 projects worldwide. We try to help Catholics in need wherever they are repressed or persecuted and therefore prevented from living according to their faith."

What is now Aid to the Church in Need was founded by Dutch Catholic priest Father Werenfried van Straaten at Christmas 1947 to aid German expellees and refugees fled from or expelled from Eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War, many of them Catholic.

With international headquarters in Königstein in Germany since 1975, it currently has branches in 16 countries of the world. Its main publication is Mirror.

Following a 1984 decree of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, Aid to the Church in Need was recognized by the Catholic Church as a "universal public association of faithful".

In 2009, the organization raised more than $108 million, entirely from private donations.

Aid to the Church in Need was born out of the ashes of World War II, when Father Werenfried Van Straaten — a young Dutch priest whose name means "Warrior for Peace" — set out to meet the material and spiritual needs of homeless and dispossessed victims of the war, including the German civilians in occupied and partitioned Germany after May 1945.

In the more than half century since, Aid to the Church in Need has expanded its mission, bringing material aid and the light of the Gospel to millions of poor, forgotten, and persecuted people in more than 120 countries. It all began on Christmas Day, 1947, with an article, "No Room at the Inn," written by Father Werenfried for his abbey's newsletter Excerpt from, "No Room at the Inn," the article that gave birth to the organization in 1947.

"Eighty miles to the east lies a town (in post-war Germany) in ruins. Hardly anything remains of it except for a gigantic air-raid shelter, a so-called Bunker, like the ones the Germans built everywhere to protect the population from bombing. Those of the impoverished people of the town who still remain alive dwell in this single Bunker. Thousands are crowded together in pestilential stench. Each family, insofar as they can still be called families, lies huddled together on a few square yards of concrete. Here is neither fire nor warmth, other than the warmth of bodies crowded together. Among these people too, Christ seeks to dwell in His purity, His love, His goodness. The shepherds worshipped Christ in a stable, but these people have not even a stable. By human standards Christ cannot live here. There is no room for Him."