Abstract
In academic and popular discourses, Poland has been consistently described as a “Catholic country”. However, the level of identification with the Catholic Church in Poland has been gradually declining in the last three decades. In this paper, we explore the recent wave of civil protests which began in October 2020 as a reaction to the new restrictions on legal access to abortion. Thousands of people took to the streets to participate in what became known as “the Women’s Strike”. The protesters not only rejected the government but also dissented from the Catholic Church and its strong influence over the Polish state. The case study presented here focuses on the events that took place in Kraków, particularly the protests around the famous “Pope’s window”. We identify the symbolic tools used by the protesters and explore the connection between “Women’s Strike”, the emergent discourses on the poor handling of the sexual abuse problems in the Catholic Church by John Paul II and his close associates, and the growing contestation of Church’s position towards LGBTQ+. We employ the notion of crisis to discuss the implications of the mass protests to the transformation of the Catholic landscape in Poland.
Highlights
We describe the local conditions and manifestations of the crisis, the key role of the Catholic Church in the shaping of abortion law in Poland, the corresponding actions of those who resisted the change of legislation and of the national
The bishop constructed a conflict between men and women, by implying that the women who participated in similar protests in Italy in the 1970s perceived men as “enemies”. He connected the behavior of protesting women to the reified, essentialized discourses on womanhood promoted by the Catholic Church (Adamiak 1999), and asserted that “these women were writing off their entire female identity, their calling to love for another [person], to motherhood”
The Catholic Church has been opposing abortion since Pius IX in the 19th century; during the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis was much stronger on the birth control
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In the last three decades, the Catholic discourse on contraception and abortion penetrated the official language of political elites in Poland and key legal acts (Szelewa 2016) It became increasingly internalized and reproduced by many women, who talk about their sexuality with frequent references to sin, morality and nature (Mishtal 2015; Szelewa 2016; Szustowicz 2006). The so called “Polish abortion compromise of 1993” was partially an outcome of the Catholic Church lobbying for the change of the 1956 legislation and entailed a ban on abortions due to “social” reasons This new law limited legal abortions to three conditions: where the prenatal tests indicate a high probability of severe and irreversible impairment of the fetus or an incurable life-threatening disease; where the pregnancy poses a threat to the life or health of a woman; or when the pregnancy resulted from a prohibited act, such as rape or incest.
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