Introduction: The Scientization of the Social in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

In a memorandum submitted to Germany’s Catholic bishops in 1905, the Jesuit priest Hermann Krose called for the establishment of a central statistical office in the Catholic Church. Krose was strongly influenced by the ideas of the Belgian astronomer and statistician Alphonse Quetelet (1796–1874). According to Quetelet, the behaviour of individuals in a given social context displayed a certain probability to commit crime, suicide or other social actions. Since differences between individuals disappeared in larger aggregates, societies as a whole showed characteristic patterns that could be compared by statistical means.1 A central statistical office for Germany’s Catholic Church, Krose proposed, should gather data on the number of Catholics and priests in each diocese, the numbers of conversions and lapses, the percentage of Easter communicants, and the average number of church-goers on Sunday. Such data, he argued, would be a crucial weapon in the confessional conflict with the Protestants and also demonstrate the modern administrative standards of the church. Krose began publishing his own annual compilation of data in 1908 and set up a provisional office for church statistics in 1909. A full-fledged statistical office of the Catholic Church was finally set up in 1915. Well into the post-Vatican II period, statistical data on church-goers and other statistical parameters of practised piety provided a crucial basis for internal debates on pastoral shortcomings and reform strategies in the German Catholic Church.2KeywordsCriminal JusticeWelfare StateInternational Labour OrganizationOpinion PollingSocial ReformThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.