Dealing with Conflict and Dissent in the Roman Catholic Church. An Inventory from the Perspective of Canon Law

The Roman Catholic Church is a highly organized legal community of faith. It has differentiated legal rules and procedures on how to deal with conflicts and dissent within the communion, and it also uses legal means to try to prevent deviations that endanger the community and the faith. These canonical regulations convey the self-understanding of the Catholic Church and therefore the theology of the legislator, especially its ecclesiology. The article examines at first the specific provisions of canon law which seek to avoid conflict and/or dissent as much as possible and then deals with different constellations and types of conflicts, along with the corresponding canonical procedures, whereby a distinction has to be made between conflicts that individual faithfuls have amongst each other, as well as conflicts between Catholics and institutions under church sponsorship, and those between Catholics and the church hierarchy. As a result, this chapter shows that the Roman Catholic Church offers only an extremely small space for conflict and dissent: Even disputes between the faithful are to be avoided as much as possible or are to be settled quickly, in a peaceful manner. Disobedience to church authority is punishable if necessary, and Catholics can never legally deviate from binding doctrinal guidelines. Since Pope Francis wants to give a more practical importance to penal law through its current revision, doctrinal dissent could also soon be punished more consistently than has been the case so far.