Catholic Church Reform and Organizations Research in the Netherlands and Germany, 1945–1980

Abstract

At first glance, the Catholic Church is a highly unlikely candidate for the practical application of social scientific knowledge and techniques such as opinion polling or organizations research. In the years after 1945, official ecclesiology reaffirmed the traditional idea of the Church as the ‘mystical body of Christ’, as outlined in the encyclical Mystici Corporis, which was issued by pope Pius XII in June 1943. According to this notion, the Church was not only a strictly hierarchical body. Even more, as a mystical body, the Church had to be understood not in terms of a worldly, man-made bureaucratic structure with changeable elements. Quite to the contrary, it was instituted by God and designed by him as a closely knit community, and as an organism where the individual elements had to fulfil a given and fixed role.¹ As the Church was conceptualized as a metaphysical entity with ‘ascribed’ roles and elements (to use the terminology of Talcott Parsons), no entry point for social scientific ideas on organizational change seemed to exist. The human relations movement had coined the phrase ‘overcoming resistance to change’ as a motto for the pivotal aim of this type of organizations research.² Seen as a mystical body, the Church was predicated precisely on the rejection of institutional change not only as a practical option, but also as an inherent possibility.