STREIT, KARL. - Founder of ecclesiastical cartography, b. 5 Aug. 1874 at Dittersbüchl (diocese of Litoměřice, Czechoslovakia), d. 31 May 1935.
Having entered the Society of the Divine Word in 1893 and been ordained priest in 1898, he worked as a cartographer at the Mother House of the Society at Steyl in Holland and later at S. Gabriele, where in 1930 he founded the Cartographic Institute.
Besides the many geographical-missionary, linguistic, and ethnological maps (among others, also the wall maps for the Missionary Exhibition of 1925 in the Vatican), which he drew especially in connection with the work of P. Guglielmo Schmidt and his journal Anthropos, he published the following major works: Katholischer Missionsatlas, Steyl 1906; Atlas Hierarchicus. Descriptio geographica et statistica S. Romanae Ecclesiae..., Paderborn 1913; 2nd ed. ibid. 1929; Die Sprachfamilien, und Sprachkreise der Erde, Atlas, Heidelberg 1926.