The Annuario Pontificio (Italian for Pontifical Yearbook) is the annual directory of the Holy See of the Catholic Church. It lists the popes in chronological order and all officials of the Holy See's departments. It also provides names and contact information for all cardinals and bishops, the dioceses (with statistics about each), the departments of the Roman Curia, the Holy See's diplomatic missions abroad, the embassies accredited to the Holy See, the headquarters of religious institutes (again with statistics on each), certain academic institutions, and other similar information. The index includes, along with all the names in the body of the book, those of all priests who have been granted the title of "Monsignor". The red-covered yearbook, compiled by the Central Office of Church Statistics and published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, is mostly in Italian. The 2015 edition had more than 2,400 pages and cost . According to the Pontifical Yearbook of 2022, the number of Catholics in the world increased to 1,359,612,000 at the end of 2020. History A yearbook of the Catholic Church was published, with some interruptions, from 1716 to 1859 by the Cracas printing firm in Rome, under the title Information for the Year ... () From 1851, a department of the Holy See began producing a different publication called Hierarchy of the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church Worldwide (), which took the title Annuario Pontificio in 1860 but ceased publication in 1870. This was the first yearbook published by the Holy See itself, but its compilation was entrusted to the newspaper Giornale di Roma. The Monaldi Brothers () began in 1872 to produce their own yearbook entitled The Catholic Hierarchy and the Papal Household for the Year ... (). The Vatican Press took over the Gerarchia Cattolica in 1885, thus making it a semi-official publication. It bore the indication "official publication" from 1899 to 1904, but this ceased when, giving the word "official" a more restricted sense, the Acta Sanctae Sedis, forerunner of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, was declared the only "official" publication of the Holy See. In 1912, it resumed the title Annuario Pontificio. From 1912 to 1924, it included not only lists of names, but also brief illustrative notes on departments of the Roman Curia and on certain posts within the papal court, a practice to which it returned in 1940. For some years, beginning in 1898, the Maison de la Bonne Presse