Dissent, understood as a public rejection of the authoritatively pronounced rules, verdicts, and truth claims within a given community, although disruptive, can offer multiple benefits to the life of the community. However, the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) effectively leaves no other option for dissenters than to adopt a stance of obedient silence. This article emphasizes a need for a shift in the magisterial attitude toward dissent, one in which Catholic truth claims can bear the collective scrutiny and questioning expressed through dissent and thus be more fully integrated into the life of the community. To do that, the article divides the discussion into two parts. First, the article offers an analysis of the concept of dissent, its potential benefits, and its entanglement with the other concepts more broadly. Second, it scrutinizes the construction of power, tradition, and dissent in the RCC specifically.

This article argues that the call in Laudato Si’ for an integral ecology can also be understood as teaching about the church. It first excavates the theological presuppositions on which the practical teaching of the encyclical rests, that the interrelation between church and context is constitutive of ecclesial tradition. It suggests that Laudato Si’ provides