Introduction -- Counting piety: Church statistics and its uses -- In search of social reality: sociography -- Representation and contestation after the Council: opinion polling -- Planning the future of the Church: organizations research -- Psychology and group dynamics as "humane" scientific approaches -- Conclusion. The scientization of the Church as an encounter with a dangerous modernity
Summary
During the three decades from 1945 to 1975, the Catholic Church in West Germany employed a broad range of methods from empirical social research. Statistics, opinion polling, and organizational sociology, as well as psychoanalysis and other approaches from the "psy sciences," were debated and introduced in pastoral care. In adopting these methods for their own work, bishops, parish clergy, and pastoral sociologists tried to open the church up to modernity in a rapidly changing society. In the process, they contributed to the reform agenda of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Through its
