I want to begin by expressing my appreciation to Curtis Freeman for his comments. I have been reflecting on this topic since it was first mentioned as a possibility. What Freeman has offered serves us well as a beginning to this very important conversation. Hopefully, I can add to that beginning.

The concept of “dissent” is of recent coinage and narrow use in Catholic theology. However, since rereadings of Catholic tradition through the lens of cultural studies have revealed its constitutive plurality, we are faced with a profound tension between a critical description of ecclesial polyphony and the normative ideals of unity and consensus. This interdisciplinary reappraisal of tradition raises far-reaching theological questions: Do we necessarily have to refer to inner-ecclesial polyphony as “dissent”? Does “dissent” silently rely on (and thus reinforce) established hierarchies of authority in the church? What could be counterhegemonic frameworks that resist entrenched power/knowledge regimes in the church? In which ways could “dissent” be reconceived to allow for a constructive approach to inner-ecclesial plurality? Once we raise questions such as these, we begin to see that Catholic theology lacks adequate models for a reflection of ecclesial polyphony in its full complexity. This roundtable addresses this lacuna: it offers critical case studies of historical and contemporary forms of “dissent” within the church, and it engages the theological and ecclesiological issues at stake.

Our roundtable wishes to explore the need for the church today to move beyond what we might call the orthodoxy/dissent binary, that is, the assumption of one narrowly construed orthodox position, over against which all other construals of the Christian faith are presented as heretical or at least dissenting positions. This binary presents, for many scholars today, insuperable difficulties. To begin with, it emphasizes doctrinal unity over theological diversity. It privileges office over charism, magisterium over the sense of the faithful, authoritative pronouncement over communal discovery. The dominance of the orthodoxy/dissent binary depends in turn on an account of doctrinal teaching authority still indebted to Pope Pius XII and his claim that when the ordinary papal magisterium has pronounced on a matter, it is no longer subject to open debate. The solution, in the minds of some, lies in dispelling dangerous notions of orthodoxy, heresy, and dissent as intrinsically hegemonic terms that mask politically oriented power regimes. I am not inclined to dismiss entirely, however, claims to doctrinal normativity, even as I acknowledge the real danger of abuse.

Modern-day Guatemalan history is marked by the thirty-six-year-long civil war that ravaged the nation. The 1954 CIA-backed military coup of President Jacobo Arbenz led to an extended period of violence and armed conflict, the longest in Central American history. The civil war began in 1960. Military strategies included kidnappings, torture, disappearances, and death lists. More than 245,000 civilians were disappeared or killed and over 400 villages destroyed. In addition, over 1 million people were displaced from their homes. The armed conflict thus damaged the people, the environment, and the very psyche of Guatemala, creating a culture of corruption, fear, and silence. The civil war ended in late 1996 with the signing of the Peace Accords. However some scholars and activists argue that while the Accords were signed, peace has yet to be established in present-day Guatemala.

In Washington, DC, at the top of the long hill up Wisconsin Avenue where Massachusetts Avenue crosses Thirty-Fourth Street, there has been for a long time a fixture on the landscape. An old man, life scarred and perhaps homeless, perhaps schizophrenic, holds a big homemade sign that reads “Vatican Protects Pedophiles Worldwide.”

This contribution to the roundtable will compare two forms of protest in the church—one that is radical and challenges the church from the outside, and the other that is institutional and challenges the church from the inside. For case studies, I will compare Católicos Por La Raza (CPLR), a group of Chicano students that employed dramatic demonstrations in its protest of the Catholic Church, and PADRES, an organization of Catholic priests that utilized the tools at its disposal to challenge racism from within the hierarchy. I will outline the ecclesiologies of CPLR and PADRES, the ways in which these visions led to differing means of dissent, and the successes and failures of each group.

This contribution will examine several theological methods used to understand morally egregious examples of historical dissent in the Catholic Church. From the 1600s to the late 1800s, large numbers of Catholics in the young United States dissented from the Holy See in one particularly egregious manner: their support for and defense of chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. While chattel slavery is universally declared horrific and immoral, its vestiges have not been erased from church history, nor has its influence been eradicated in the modern experience of Christians in the United States today. After naming the contemporary problem caused by this historical example of dissent and analyzing theological approaches to ameliorate this problem, I will propose a theological-historical approach that may offer better solutions in the future.

The contributions to this roundtable weave a rich tapestry of dissent in the Roman Catholic Church. Together, they expose some of the divergent voices within the church—voices that resist easy reconciliation and unification. Dissent, this roundtable shows, takes many forms; it can be directed ad intra (Willard) or ad extra (Gonzalez Maldonado), it can be geared toward the justification of hegemonic structures (Slattery) or aim at their subversion (Steidl). Moreover, these contributions do not just highlight the multiplicity of voices within the church. Indeed, each of them points to conflict and contestation between the diverse Catholicisms they discuss: each of these sometimes-contradictory Catholicisms claims to be authentically and normatively Catholic. This indicates that a discourse about plurality within the church is at the same time a discourse about the struggle for sovereignty of interpretation over the church. Further, the contributions also show that these contestations over the right to define orthodoxy take place under asymmetrical relations of authority and power. The struggle over right belief and right practice is first and foremost a struggle over who has a voice to define Catholic orthodoxy in the first place—who can participate, from which position, in this struggle? Ultimately, therefore, this roundtable demonstrates that questions of normativity by no means become arbitrary or sidelined once we reveal the silent and silenced voices underneath the established master narrative of the church about itself as one and stable. Yet, at the same time, it also becomes obvious that established theological approaches to this inner-ecclesial plurality no longer hold. The dominant theological readings of Catholic tradition have always reckoned with a history of plural, deviant Catholicisms, but they have subjected this inner-ecclesial plurality to the theological ideal and a historical construction of unity and consensus. However, as Gaillardetz and Slattery point out, this narrative of unity has lost both its innocence and its self-evidence as the only legitimate framework for organizing the “raw material” of Catholic tradition. Rereadings of church history through the lens of power-critical studies make visible that Catholic tradition, too, is a power/knowledge regime. They reveal that orthodoxy is, in a literal sense, “heresy”: it takes its shape through epistemopolitical choices (αἵρεσις); it is forged through the exclusion of alternative theological narratives. Where do we stand after this destabilization of tradition, after this loss of innocence? Once stability and consensus have been problematized as the normative organizing principles of Catholic tradition, how else should we think of the church? Can we develop alternative models that take conflict and contestation into account as constitutive moments in our understanding of the church, rather than an afterthought to be eradicated?

Sr. Prudence Allen's extensive work on the concept of woman finds its culmination in this massive book, the third in a trilogy that began with a first volume on the Aristotelian revolution (up to 1250) and a second that traced developments from 1250 to 1500. In this exhaustively and meticulously researched book, Allen argues for an “integral complementarity” between man and woman that she argues is “proven” through its ability to cohere with John Henry Newman's criteria for doctrinal development, set out in his Essay on the Development of Doctrine (10–11). Through a detailed survey of both men and women thinkers since 1500, including some of the most prominent—Leonardo da Vinci, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant—as well as some lesser known—Elena Tarabotti and Moderata Fonte—Allen argues that only a conception of complementarity based in a revised Aristotelian hylomorphism can adequately account for what it means to be a woman as well as be in accord with Roman Catholic teaching.