Encounters with Modernity: The Catholic Church in West Germany, 1945–1975 by Benjamin Ziemann (review)

This excellent English translation of Benjamin Ziemann’s Habilitationsschrift, first published in 2007, makes more accessible Ziemann’s examination of West German Catholic reactions to secularization. Focused on the Church’s adoption of sociological methods of self-analysis in an era of “scientization of the social,” Ziemann’s exploration of metaphor, theology, and the social sciences offers an unusually rich interdisciplinary approach from which all scholars can benefit. In a strongly argued study that stands out for its precision of terms, distillation of complex background, and fulsome documentation, Ziemann paints a nuanced picture of a responsive, if divided, Church confronting unprecedented secularity.

Studies of German Catholicism necessarily raise certain methodological debates, and Ziemann nails his colors to the mast by substituting “functional differentiation” (4) for social-moral milieu theory and reframing, while accepting, the secularization paradigm. In functionally differentiated societies, he argues, religion no longer represents a set of shared values but simply one of numerous competing subsystems, each resting on distinctive ideas, including those of politics, science, and education. From the perspective of religious bodies, secularization—defined here as the observation of and response to the effects of functional differentiation—entails both the privatization of religion and the availability of secular means to combat it. In the case of West Germany, the Catholic Church experienced a precipitous loss of parishioners and priests; in turn, it relied on a host of sociological methods to investigate and address its perceived predicament.

Despite a late wartime and early postwar religious revival, the re-Christianization of Germany soon revealed itself as more apparent than real. To assess German Catholics’ Kirchlichkeit or “practiced piety,” Church officials continued decades-long practices of compiling statistics until the 1960s, when evidence of diminishing lay involvement prompted surveyors to redefine “practicing Christian” (51) to include new measures of affiliation such as concern for global problems. If expanding the boundaries of Church loyalty enabled clerics to mask the scope of declining Church attendance, linking Church adherence to social environment through new sociological methods laid the stark realities bare. The Church’s support for sociography from 1950 on remained ambivalent, as it failed to establish a central research center; but sociography soon induced a more empirical, less corporatist mindset among Catholic leaders and a consensus that the Church was in crisis.

While regional missionary efforts based on sociographic data failed to rejuvenate institutional Catholicism, the Church’s employment of polling experts after the Second Vatican Council opened new vistas. Initially conducted in the “style of secret military commando campaigns” (123), the Church’s use of opinion polls to assess baptized Catholics’ “cognitive dissonance” (145) regarding ecclesiastical values led in 1970 to the world’s largest poll on religious sociology. In tackling the priest shortage, the Church deployed the sociological system of social roles to define more clearly the gamut of clerical obligations. Characterizing priests as “team workers” and bishops as “function bearers” was just one manifestation of the Church’s embrace of “sociological functionalism and organization optimization” (208). It was followed by the early 1970s’ “age of therapy” (220), as psychological theories and practices pervaded pastoral care and adult education but, interestingly, not children’s programs. These changes affirmed postwar individualism and ultimately, Ziemann argues, democratized the Church.

The influence of American and French theories and methods testifies, in a point Ziemann underplays, to the openness of West Germans to non-German thought, though he does note the significance of Catholic acceptance of Protestant experts and theologians. But one wonders about other aspects of the Church’s “encounters with modernity” such as the use of new advertising and communications strategies. The question of politics also lurks silently throughout a book almost absent of politics. How do we categorize a political party infused with religiosity in a functionally differentiated society? How did the Church grapple with its attenuated influence in the political sphere...