Catholic Dictionary

Find accurate definitions of over 5,000 Catholic terms and phrases (including abbreviations). Based on Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

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DISSENT, DOCTRINAL

The theory that a professed Catholic may legitimately disagree with an official teaching of the Catholic Church and, in fact, should disagree in order to advance the Church's interests. It is based on one of several erroneous premises, e.g., Modernism, which denies that divine faith is an assent of the mind to God's revealed truth, or process theology, which postulates an evolving deity and therefore also an everchanging truth. Most often the dissent applies to some doctrine of Christian morals which, though infallibly true, because taught by the Church's universal ordinary magisterium, has not been solemnly defined.