The Battle for Symbolic Power: Kraków as a Stage of Renegotiation of the Social Position of the Catholic Church in Poland

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.

1. Introduction

Poland has been consistently described and referred to as a “Catholic country”. The hegemonic position of the Catholic Church in Poland has been strongly reflected in popular debates as well as political and academic discourses. Although the level of identification with the Catholic Church in Poland has been gradually declining in the last three decades (Baniak 2011; Mariański 2018; Mandes and Rogaczewska 2013), the persisting overwhelming dominance of the Church remains baffling to many observers. At times, this results in orientalist framings of Polish public religiosity as “unique, atavistic, not-quite European”, a perspective criticized by Porter-Szűcs (2011, p. 15). In 2020, the unrelenting pressure of Church hierarchs and Catholic pro-life organizations in Poland led to tightening what was already one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws. The change of legislation confirmed the strong stance of the Church as a political actor, but at the same time exposed the diminishing acceptance for this kind of power within the society.

In this paper, we discuss the material and symbolic means used in the wave of protests against the Catholic Church in Poland. The mass protests began in October 2020, as an immediate reaction to the decision of the Constitutional Tribunal, which declared one of the three exceptions allowing legal abortion in Poland unconstitutional. As consequence of this ruling, abortion, in cases where prenatal tests indicate a high probability of severe and irreversible impairment of the fetus or an incurable life-threatening disease, is no longer permissible. Following this announcement, thousands of people took to the streets to participate in what became known as “the Women’s Strikes”. These mass protests were the largest anti-government demonstrations since the Solidarity movement of 1980s, which led to the collapse of the Communist rule in the country (Magdziarz and Santora 2020) and the first large-scale anti-church manifestations in Polish history.

The persistence of the debates on reproductive rights in Poland should not be considered in isolation. The attempts to restrict women’s rights are one of the facets of a global shift towards the populist traditionalism (Kaiser 2020; Król and Pustułka 2018; Paternotte 2014; Korolczuk et al. 2019). As Verloo and Paternotte (2018, p. 1) observe, the opposition to feminist and sexual politics “has become more visible in Europe, and can now be found at national, regional and international level, and involves different kinds of actors and mechanisms”. Legal restrictions of reproductive rights are increasingly becoming a right-wing political response to the demographic changes in Europe and one of the key tenets of broader family policies (Grzebalska and Zacharenko 2018). When it comes to the anti-abortion demonstrations, these periodically take place in Belgium, France, and Spain, with the growing pressure to restrict legal abortion (Paternotte 2014). As we will demonstrate on the Polish example, the moral and ethical complexity of reproductive issues lends them to emotionalization and polarization and places them at the center of populist politics (Elies and Gutsche 2018).

We focus on the numerous actions falling under the category of Women’s Strikes which took place in Kraków between October 2020 and January 20211. The case presented here is considered as an example of the aforementioned global trends; however, we analyze it with reference to the specific local political and socio-cultural contexts in order to expand the existing understanding of the strategies and material and discursive means used by different social actors engaging with the complex transformations of the social space in Poland. By focusing our discussion on Poland, we aim to at least partially fill the blank area on the map of international feminism and shift the stereotypical perceptions of feminist projects in the post-socialist world of Central and Eastern Europe, “as the blurry copy of the West” (Marling 2021, p. 94). In line with this, we analyze the opposition towards the attempt of the current government at further restricting of the abortion law in Poland, as part of a larger process marked by the growing polarization of politics, parallel increase of support for and resistance against social justice and equality, and the politicization of gender and sexuality. We describe the local conditions and manifestations of the crisis, particularly 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 Church hierarchy. While unpacking the symbolic tools used during the strikes, we account for local specificities and acknowledge the different expressions of agency of various social actors.

The conditions of possibility, or “the emotional opportunity” (Wulff et al. 2014, p. 7) for the mass resistance to the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal, can be framed as a triple crisis. The political crisis developing since the Law and Justice Party’s ascent to power in 2015 was brought by the systematic dismantling of the rule of law and targeting rights-based civil society. The anti-democratic changes were effected through politicization of the judiciary system; unprecedented replacing of public administration personnel; limiting the independence of public media and cultural institutions and securitization of human rights and pro-democracy struggles (Kinowska-Mazaraki 2021; Grzebalska and Zacharenko 2018). These developments provoked a reaction by the EU; however, the concerns have been rejected by Polish government as an interference in Poland’s internal affairs. The second crisis concerns the Catholic Church in Poland currently grappling with the sexual abuse scandals and the declining levels of identification with the Church in the Polish society (Guzik 2020). The third crisis was brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic which sparked high levels of health-related anxieties and gave rise to radical changes in multiple spheres of life.

In order to make sense of the external contingencies, or conditions of possibility for the mass resistance toward the Catholic Church, we focus on Kraków—the Polish “holy city”2—and the headquarters of the Curia of Kraków, which is the residence of Kraków’s metropolitan, Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski. We describe the process in which Kraków was made a stage of the Women’s Strikes, and its symbolic culmination, namely the proclamation of the Curia headquarters “the house of Satan”.

2. Catholic Church, Right-Wing Politics, and Reproductive Rights in Poland

The social position of the Catholic Church in Poland has been vividly described by Porter-Szűcs (2017, p. 6): “with state support of religious education and with crosses or pictures of Pope John Paul II hanging in most government offices, many would argue that the state does, in fact, have an official religion (particularly since the election of 2015)”. Nevertheless, after the decades of an uncontested religious hegemony, enormous institutional power and unquestioned moral authority, in recent years, the social position of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland began to weaken and “crisis” became a leading concept in public debates on its condition. In current discussions, the notion of “crisis of the Church” is commonly employed both from an etic perspective (as a social diagnosis of Polish Catholicism) and an emic perspective (as means used by Church hierarchy to make sense of the situation)3. While in academic discourse the notion of crisis is often deconstructed and sometimes rejected (Dreyer 2015; Zduniak 2019), there is a surprising consensus in the public discussion asserting that we are facing a deep crisis of the Church. However, in these narratives, the “crisis” is defined in various ways. Usually, it is constructed as the underlying cause of the recently observable trends, namely the decline in the number of believers, decreasing level of trust in the Church institutions, the diminishing authority of the hierarchs and the increasing critique of the Church.

The figure of the Church as a besieged fortress is central in narratives of the Polish Episcopate and some conservative commentators. The supposedly dramatic situation of the “besieged” Church is emphasized by the metaphor of the “plague” (“zaraza”—“plague”, “pestilence”), often used, among others, by Archbishop Jędraszewski (“the rainbow plague”, “the red, atheistic plague”). In the conservative media, the Church is also sometimes described as “infected” by communists or “the homosexual lobby” (see, especially, Oko 2020). The “infection” not only weakens the trust in the Church and its authority, but also brings about a moral deterioration of the clergy, evidenced by sexual and financial scandals. Sexual abuse scandals (especially those involving children victims) are constructed as both the cause and the effect of the crisis in the Church. Some commentators speak about systemic determinants of sexual abuse and interpret them in the category of sin or departure from the gospel. Others, however, highlight the responsibility of individuals and accuse media of using manipulation in the campaign against the Church. The political engagement of the Church is often seen as another important symptom of the “crisis”. For example, during the Women’s Strike, demonstrators repeatedly accused the Catholic Church in Poland of “departing from the teachings of Jesus” and “departing from the Gospel” (Sidorski 2020; Szustak 2020). This double perspective allows us to look at Women’s Strike as an expression of discontent with the “crisis in the Church” (associated with political commitment and moral decay of the clergy) and as a symptom of “the crisis of the Church”, understood as the loss of its authority.

Against the background of the “crisis”, the influence of the Church on the reproductive rights in Poland is remarkable. 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 also 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 post-1989 internalization of Catholic discourse, however, is not universal. Substantial disagreement with the Church’s stance in relation to the sexual behavior was captured in the survey by the Pew Research Center, with 41% of those who participated in the survey between 2015–2017 refusing to follow the Church’s teaching on abortion (Pew Research Center 2018). The level of acceptance of a Catholic perspective on birth regulation and reproductive rights is unevenly distributed across different age groups. Szustowicz (2006), for example, observed a rejection of the Catholic discourse on sexuality among teenagers and a more critical stance towards a Catholic ban of abortion and contraception among younger women (in their 20s). Although some young people actively participate in the Catholic faith based organizations, many of whom are lobbying against abortion, Mandes and Rogaczewska (2013, p. 259) argue that the Catholic Church in Poland have alienated young people. The persistence of what the authors called “cold religious wars” on abortion was one of the most important factors which led to a sharp decrease in the number of young people identifying with the Church.

The declared attitudes towards the influence of the Church on reproductive rights notwithstanding, the views on abortion changed considerably over the thirty years since political transformation. The communist era law of 1956 which replaced the pronatalist Stalinist policies of the early 1950s made a concession for abortions due to bad living conditions and left the decision to the physicians with no restrictions regarding the time of pregnancy (Fuszara 1991 ). During the period liberal attitudes towards abortion were relatively popular4, and, for some women, the procedure became a substitute for using contraception (Mishtal 2015). With the systemic transformation, abortion became deprivatized and politicized. The stance of the Church presented the legality of abortion as an obstacle to the formation of a moral community. The argumentation coalesced with the liberal discourse of the transformation period. The connecting issue was that of the protection of the rights of the unborn persons (religious category) or individuals (liberal category). The rights of a future individual were prioritized over the rights of a pregnant woman whose body incorporated an embryo, or the fetus. As Janine Holc (1997, p. 421) noted, the absence of women in all ethical strains of argument was remarkable: “’Abortion’” became a grid of rights-bearing positions from which women were excluded. ‘Woman’ was not a subject position permitted autonomy in either Liberal or church discourse.”

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. Since its introduction, “the compromise” remained in a permanent state of contestation, which is reflected by the fact that, in the common usage, the word itself appears in quotes. As Małgorzata Tomczak noted, by labeling it a “compromise”, the restrictive 1993 Act that actually tightened the previous regulation is presented as “a careful balance between a full ban of abortion at one extreme, and its unconditional availability at the other” (Tomczak 2021). Its stability was based on the discontinuity between the public status quo and the private views and practices related to sexuality and reproductive rights among the large proportion of Poles who supported more liberal approaches to abortion. The discontinuity was manifested in the development of large infrastructure offering clandestine abortions in Poland and non-profit organizations assisting women in need of abortion (Desperak 2003; Chełstowska 2011; Mishtal 2015) or other forms of support (see Wejbert-Wąsiewicz 2014) for the discussion on “abortion enclaves” in Poland). The services offered included help in purchasing safe substances to undergo chemical abortion at home and help in arranging trips abroad to the countries where abortion could be performed legally.

For the entire duration of the “abortion compromise”, the Catholic Church in Poland continued to exert political pressure with regard to the abortion legislation. The issue was re-instated as one of the central points of the political agenda with the Law and Justice Party coming to power in 2015. The renewed focus on the reproductive rights among the political elites did not come as a surprise. The politicization of the maternal body which has a long tradition in Poland5 has been coupled with a limited access of women to political representation from the very beginning of the political transformation (Krzyżanowska 2010). The visible leadership roles within the Solidarity movement of the 1980 were taken up by men, whereas many women working behind the scenes were written out of history. The feminist agendas within Solidarity were repressed as insignificant against the backdrop of the fight against communism. Following the political transformation, the abortion became a decisive issue in the abolishing of the women’s section within Solidarity (Kulawik 2014).

In the traditionally male dominated political sphere, the long-standing alliance of “throne and altar” has been reinforced under the rule of the Law and Justice Party (Żuk and Żuk 2019). The ultra-nationalist, anti-pluralist party, founded by Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, built its success on a mixture of agrarian traditions, shared Catholic heritage, long history of authoritarianism, and a disillusionment with democracy and the EU (Greven 2016). The electoral result of the Law and Justice Party suggests somewhat limited magnitude of the mandate; however, the majority in Parliament enables the party members to exercise their power with marked disregard for the opposition and to apply the doctrine of majoritarianism to the main public institutions, including the Constitutional Tribunal, the prosecutor’s office, public media, and the civil service. This results in successive dismantling of the checks and safety measures existing within the Polish democracy and limiting the role of opposition (see Kucharczyk 2017).

The party rhetoric is embedded in the conflation of the Catholicism and Polish national identity and the juxtaposition of “common people” and “liberal, cosmopolitan elites”. The Law and Justice politicians emphasize their loyalty to the Catholic Church, routinely using Catholic language to induce moral panics and state of fear and consequently strengthen its position of a political force offering a remedy to those (Żuk and Żuk 2020). For many commentators, this appears to be a calculated, instrumental use of religion on the part of the political elite. As Topidi (2019, p. 293) notes, “Politicians choose to express commitment to the Catholic dogma in an attempt to get (and keep) public support through the occasional use of religious arguments.”

The political move to strengthen the ban on abortion re-initiated in 2016 disturbed the silently accepted division between the private and public and for many opened questions about the meaning of everyday problems, choices, and autonomy in the contemporary Polish society (Korolczuk et al. 2019). Ignoring the growing opposition, on 10 January 2018, the Presidium of the Polish Episcopate published an appeal to “stop eugenic abortion”, in which it urged the members of the Parliament to support the legislation project “Stop Abortion”. In March of the same year, the Episcopate published on its official website a note from the 378th Plenary Meeting in which the bishops called for acceleration of work on the legislation change (Nawojski 2019, p. 15). In the Autumn of 2020, under the continued pressure from some of the Church hierarchy and anti-abortion activists, a decisive move to change the abortion legislation was made in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The change of legislation circumvented the Parliament and was affected by the decision of the Constitutional Tribunal turned into an active supporter of the government (Sadurski 2018; Rak 2020). The initial reaction of the Church hierarchy confirmed the role of the Church as one of the main forces behind the change of the legislation. The triumphant official statements included that of Archbishop Jędraszewski, who proclaimed: “It would be difficult to imagine a more welcome news coming in just today, while we’re celebrating here—in Białe Morza, in Kraków, in the sanctuary of Saint John Paul II—a ceremony of the pope who wanted to go down in the history primarily as the Pope of Families” (Waluś 2020). A similar sense of victory was expressed by the head of the Conference of the Polish Episcopate, Archbishop Gądecki, who stated:

I received today’s decision of the Constitutional Tribunal ruling the eugenic abortion to be incompatible with the constitution with great appreciation. With this decision it was affirmed that the idea of “life unworthy of living” stands in a stark conflict with the principle of the democratic, legal state. The life of every human from the moment of conception to the natural death presents the same value in front of God and should be protected by the state to the same degree.

(Gądecki 2020)

The initial celebratory tone changed when the protests directly addressing the Church started. On 27 October, the spokesmen for the Conference of Polish Episcopate, Leszek Gęsiak (2020) declared: “This is a political decision. It was not the Church who started this war. In truth we did not want this war.” While before the Women’s Strike, the dominant discourse in the Church conflated the principles of a democratic state and religious principles (“the state” was often constructed as accountable to “God” and the Church) for its decisions), the emergence of mass opposition brought about the discursive shift: the Church and the state are presented as distinct, independent entities.

With the growing wave of protests and media interest, the internal divisions in Church—yet another facet of the “crisis in Church”—manifested sharply. The voices of Church representatives who did not support the initiatives to change the abortion legislation, or were very critical of the way this change was brought about became more audible. One of the well-known figures in the Church in Poland, sister Małgorzata Chmielewska stated: “The fight for life needs to start with supporting those who have to bear the burden of such difficult life. The choice of life will be easier then.” Speaking from a position of a mother who is raising a disabled (adopted) son she added: “Heroism must not be forced” (Chmielewska 2020).

3. Women’s Strike

The debates on abortion have fertilized the women’s movement in Poland right from the beginning of the political transformation (Fuszara 1991); however, for many years, the movement had not been able to mobilize mass support and participation (Mishtal 2015). The representatives of groups opposed to strict abortion law had an ambivalent status in the popular perception, as long as they were identified as “feminists” and juxtaposed with “ordinary women”. The feminists were constructed as rejecting the traditional gender roles, threatening to the existing structures of dominance, uprooted, anti-Catholic and ideologically homogenous (Hall 2019; Ramme and Snochowska-Gonzalez 2018). Moreover, in popular discourses, feminists in Poland were categorized alongside “an imaginary divide between “feminists” and “mothers”” (Król and Pustułka 2018, p. 379). While feminism was constructed as something for independent women, the conservative outlook was seen as more aligned with experiences of “domesticated” mothers. This perception was to some extent reinforced by the lack of interest and engagement in the Polish feminist circles with the experiences of women who decided to become stay-at-home mothers (Graff 2014). The recent restrictions on access to abortion, however, show enormous potential for affecting all women and their families and challenging these dichotomous categorizations.

Consequently, the Women’s Strike’s street protests and other actions organized under its aegis add up to the biggest wave of public unrest in the post-1989 history of Poland. The strike is a continuation of grass root mobilization which started in 2016, when a renewed attempt to impose a ban on abortion was initiated by the Legislative Initiative Committee “Stop Abortion” linked to the ruling Law and Justice Party. The resistance was manifested through petitions, internet-based happenings, counter proposal to liberalize the legislation and street demonstrations. The “Black Monday Protest” of the 3rd of October 2016 gathered tens of thousands of protesters (Budnik 2016; Korolczuk 2017) and was noted for the participation of “ordinary women” (Ramme and Snochowska-Gonzalez 2018, 2019). As Małgorzata Druciarek suggests, the “Black Monday Protest” may be seen as a first step towards the mainstreaming of feminism. During the protests, Polish streets were filled with women, men, and children from all walks of life, representing different age groups, varying levels of education, different social backgrounds, and moral orientations (Druciarek 2017). The protesters were no longer perceived as “feminists”, but as “ordinary people”—or even “the people”. Father Wiśniewski, a Dominican preacher and a former anti-communist activist observed: “For the first time in my life the anger of the people turned against the Church” and expressed his understanding in an emphatic statement: “the project concerning the ‘Stop Abortion’ bill is Pharisaic, inhuman and—I dare to say—anti-Christian” (Wiśniewski 2018).

What united the protesters was not necessarily the support for a particular legislation proposal, but a resistance towards the women being forced to sacrifice (Korolczuk 2017) and women’s objectification. The shifting strategies and agendas of the strike leaders document their striving for the pluralist character of the mobilization in which the essentialized distinctions between the “feminists” and “the defenders of life” became compromised. The main activist groups and leaders highlighted the diversity of protesting women, representing multitude of views with regard to women’s’ rights. It needs to be noted, though, that some of the participants, who advocated for radical changes focused on the minorities and socially excluded groups often lacked acceptance also from the women who were the “discriminated majority” (Ramme and Snochowska-Gonzalez 2019). Still, the leaders of Women’s Strike were able to appeal to the “ordinary woman”, and represent Polish women from all walks of life, not necessarily radicals or feminists (Korolczuk et al. 2019). In a survey, only 14% of Poles declared they were against “the Black Monday” (Druciarek 2017, p. 345). Commenting on the political impact of the protest Porter-Szűcs observed:

PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński seemed to realize that he could get away with eviscerating the constitution, politicizing the judiciary, turning the state media into a shameless propaganda outlet, and stoking the fires of xenophobia and homophobia—but he could not win in a direct assault against women’s rights.

(Porter-Szűcs 2020)

The Black Monday Protest of 2016, however, was dwarfed by the demonstrations which started in the Autumn of 2020. One of the most significant features of the latter was the unprecedented ability of the leaders to reach beyond their traditional circles supporting feminist agendas, connect with wider audiences and engage in different ways large proportion of the Polish population. Agnieszka Graff identifies this mass mobilization as an expression of the “populist feminism”, characteristic of the new generation of women who oppose rape, violence and disrespect and use various means to communicate it in a very persuasive manner (Graff 2021).

4. The Pope’s Window

The street protests in response to the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal took place in nearly 500 locations across the country and in some places outside of Poland. During the Women’s Strike, the protesters gathered in places of symbolic relevance, including the headquarters of the Constitutional Tribunal, local headquarters of the ruling party, the residence of the party leader—Jarosław Kaczyński, the Polish Parliament, church buildings, and residencies of bishops. The choice of sites of protest points directly to their anti-Church character.

The headquarters of the Kraków’s Archdiocese—the Bishop’s Palace at the 3 Franciszkanska Street—became an epicenter of the protests in the city. This place is inscribed on the map of Kraków with a special significance as a former residence of the pope John Paul II (then Cardinal Wojtyła) and an overnight accommodation during his papal visits. The central window on the second floor, above the main entrance, became to be known as the “Pope’s Window” because John Paul II used to appear in it after the official meetings and celebrations to engage in an informal conversations with inhabitants of Kraków. Thus, the window and the surrounding Franciszkańska street became the locus of numerous religious gatherings of spontaneous and familiar character. For many, the window is a navel of highly emotionally charged events where people experienced special connection with the pope; prayed with him, laughed at his jokes, and received his teaching (Hodalska 2010). In 2005, during the last days of the pope John Paul II, as his condition was deteriorating, people congregated in front of the window to pray and keep vigil. What started as a spontaneous action, was supported by the Church with Cardinal Macharski—the metropolitan of Kraków at the time—urging people to come to the window. Huge crowds gathered for days and adorned the walls of the palace and the surrounding area with posters, stickers, candles, and flowers. After pope’s death, this place became a nucleus of public mourning in Kraków. As Anna Niedźwiedź argues, the phenomenon of the Pope’s Window is the outcome of a combination of grass root and institutional place making processes (Niedźwiedź 2017). With time, “the most famous window in Poland” (Hodalska 2010, p. 159) became institutionalized; currently, it occupies the center of the stage during some special events such as, for example, the celebrations of pope’s election anniversaries. The window itself became a well-known display of John Paul II’s portrait. Pope’s images exhibited in the window changed over the years. Most recently, the idea promoted by the current metropolitan of Kraków, Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski, has been implemented and a permanent stained glass portrait of John Paul II has been installed. This new feature means that the window lost its primary function and cannot be open any more. “Not much is left from the famous ‘Pope’s Window’”, some commentators lamented (Figurski and Gurgul 2018), pointing to the symbolic closure of the place previously associated with the openness and welcoming attitude of the pope interacting with the crowds.

The change in the character of the window is paralleled by the change of sentiments expressed by the crowds gathering in front of it. The Pope’s Window—a symbol laden space—with time became a site of confrontation between the Church represented by the Kraków’s Archbishop and different groups fighting for their causes. The first mass and mediatized protest at the Pope’s Window took place after the Smolensk air disaster that took the lives of all 96 passengers of the Polish Air Force aircraft, including the President of Poland Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria. Dozens of citizens gathered in front of the curia to express their opposition to the decision of the then Metropolitan of Kraków, Stanisław Dziwisz, who agreed to bury the tragically deceased presidential couple at the side of Polish kings in the Wawel Royal Castle. This decision divided the national community: about 800 people protested in front of the Curia headquarters to express their disagreement with, or support for, Dziwisz’s decision. During this protest, no openly anti-clerical or anti-church sentiments were expressed. Demonstrators stood opposite each other with the slogans “Shame, Father Cardinal” and “Thank you, Cardinal” (see Polska Times 2010). The subdued atmosphere of the protest and respectful language matched the ongoing mourning after the catastrophe. The Kraków Archbishop at the time was treated with unquestionable respect, as a former “secretary and a friend of John Paul II”, an attitude that was to change dramatically a few years later.

The appointment of Marek Jędraszewski to the Archdiocese of Kraków in December 2016 asserted the dominance of the conservative block within the Polish episcopate. As Magdalena Meyer Resende and Anja Hennig noted, Archbishop Jędraszewski might be described as an informal leader of the National Catholic faction and the fact that Pope Francis abstained from vetoing his nomination “shows the multi-layered relationship between national episcopates and the Vatican” (Meyer Resende and Hennig 2021, p. 11).

The first protests against the attempts to restrict abortion law in Poland and counter-protests “in defense of life” which intentionally used the Pope’s Window as the site of encounter started in 2018. During that time, the emotions and language of protesters changed drastically. After the aforementioned call of the Polish Episcopate urging the members of the Parliament to recommence work on the proposed ban of abortion (the proceedings of the original legislative change were stopped after mass demonstrations in 2016), feminist organizations launched protests in front of all metropolitan curiae in Poland. The campaign was held under the mocking slogan “Word for Sunday” [Słowo na niedzielę] (Figurski 2018). At the Kraków curia, one could read or hear: “PiShops, leave women alone!”; “Vatican officials, leave our country alone!”; “Priests [be gone] to the moon!”; “Stay away from our bellies!” (quoted in Gość.pl 2018).

Just a few months later, a small civic initiative called “Enough of Silence—Stop Clericalization of Poland” born in Kraków started to organize regular happenings, performances and protests under the Pope’s Window. The protests were characterized by sharp language and strong slogans. Activists appeared in front of the curia building in costumes stained red to protest against sexual abuse of children in the Church. In August 2019, the words of Archbishop Jędraszewski, who in his sermon called “LGBT ideology” a “plague” [zaraza], sparked the public outrage. In response, representatives of sexual minorities, including Catholics, gathered in front of the Kraków’s curia headquarters under the banners reading “I am not a plague”. Following the decision of the Constitutional Tribunal, on Sunday, 25 October 2020, several thousand protesters—mainly young, dressed in black, some of them holding black umbrellas (used as symbolic links to earlier protest) or wire hangers (symbolizing illegal abortion)—blocked the whole Franciszkańska street. Some of their banners targeted the Church and clergy, for example: “Let’s pray for free will”, “Take off clerical collar and apologize to your mother”. The emotions were not only expressed through references to symbols of historical oppression of women (for example, “We are granddaughters of witches you did not manage to burn), but also explicitly named, as in the slogan: “Do you hear, curia? We are furious!” (quoted in: Pitoń 2020a).

The protesters in front of the curia headquarters expressed their disapproval in a religious language and with numerous references to religious narratives. The criticized bishops were described not just as “bad people”, but as “bad Christians.” On the banners, next to openly anti-clerical slogans, quotations from the Bible and their paraphrases were displayed: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”; “Love ‘the plague’ as thyself”; “Love thy neighbor as thyself”; “Even though I walk through the Franciszkańska 3, I will fear no evil” (quoted in: wPolityce.pl 2020).

5. The House of Satan

One of the most conspicuous instances of the Women’s Strike actions which took place under the Pope’s Window, was the “silent protest” of 1 November of 2020. On this Sunday morning, a group of ten people stood against the walls of the building holding one letter each. The letters formed a phrase “the House of Satan” [“dom szatana”] (see, for example, Chojnowska 2020a). On this occasion, the desacralization of the holy place and a public rebellion against the Church hierarchy was enacted through strong means. As Porter-Szűcs notes, as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century, the faith in the clergy was not widely embraced and the advancement of literacy contributed to the spread of clerical scandals6. However, in the past, the Catholic hierarchy in Poland remained resistant to criticism because the bishops had a recourse to theology of authority (Porter-Szűcs 2011) and in the post-war period became the embodiment of forces opposing communism. Nowadays, the fast spread of information on the wrongdoings of the representatives of the Church is facilitated by the social media. The present criticism is crossing the historically established boundary that previously people considering themselves good Catholics did not dare to cross (Porter-Szűcs 2011). In the past, the criticism towards individuals was accepted, as long as the infallibility of the Church was preserved. In present days, however, the protesters do not restrain themselves from equating the Catholic Church in Poland with Satan. Explaining their actions on 1 November, the organizers of this silent protest stated:

there is a real ‘Satan’ in our public life, who is covering up sexual abuse of children, despises women, dehumanizes LGBT+ persons, leads ideological crusade in schools, preys on state funds with no restraint. The Satan has a face and name—it is him who lives at Franciszkańska 3.

(quoted in: Chojnowska 2020a)

Although this statement could be interpreted as referring specifically to one individual, namely Archbishop Jędraszewski, when placed in the broader context of the contemporary internal divisions within the Church in Poland, the more plausible referent for “Satan” is the whole, dominant conservative National Catholic fraction of the Church, with all its problems and pathologies, referenced in a slogan: “Church! You made hell in Poland!” (quoted in: Tymczak 2020)7. Today, Jędraszewski is undoubtedly one of the most famous (if not the most famous) representative of the Polish Episcopate. Local media and satirical websites disseminate his most controversial statements (see Gazeta Krakowska 2019a) and mocking memes (see Gazeta Krakowska 2020). Activists wearing cassocks and masks with the image of Jędraszewski demonstrate in front of the curia headquarters, and his name often appears on banners. Even before he became the metropolitan of Kraków at the beginning of 2017, Jędraszewski already attracted attention of the national media for his remark:

I can easily imagine that in some time, I hope that I will not live to see it myself, that in 2050 a few whites will be shown to other human races—here in Europe—just like the Indians are shown in the United States on reservations. There were once such people who lived here, but they became extinct at their own request because they could not recognize who they were biologically.

(Jędraszewski 2013; quoted in: Onet.pl 2019)

The Archbishop also stands accused of hate speech, offending sexual minorities, and finally of lobbying to limit the reproductive rights of women. Unsurprisingly, Jędraszewski is an ardent advocate of traditional family values, a critic of so called “gender ideology”, and an outspoken opponent of the broadly understood leftist worldview (including “ecologism” and LGBT movement).

On 2 November, the Day of the Dead, the protesters gathered again under the Pope’s Window. They lit candles and laid flowers in commemoration of the victims of clergy paedophiles and young members of the LGBT community who experienced hostility and persecution in their communities and died by suicide. The protesters brought black cardboard coffins and placards. One of the slogans read “Jędraszewski to jail”. A small poster with the image of John Paul II and a caption “I was heading an organization which was covering for pedophiles” was displayed on the pavement (quoted in: Pitoń 2020b).

The protests continued after the verdict of the Constitutional Tribunal was published in the official gazette and the near-total abortion ban came into effect on 27 January 2021. On 1 February 2021, about 600 people marched under the Pope’s Window, chanting “Here’s Poland, not Vatican; here one doesn’t touch the children”, carrying banners such as “Episcopate to prison” and shouting at the police “Prosecute bishops, not female citizens” (quoted in: Zygiel 2021).

Anti-clerical atheists and committed Catholics stood side by side at the Pope’s Window, refusing to accept the political commitment of the Church and the covering of the sexual abuse by the hierarchs. At the same time, smaller demonstrations of solidarity with the Episcopate also appeared on Franciszkaska Street; for example, a group of Catholics supporting Archbishop Jędraszewski who prayed to silence the archbishop’s opponents (Ogórek 2020).

One of the most broadly commented features of the protests was the very strong, offensive, and deliberately vulgar language used in the slogans written on the placards, banners and displayed in windows (see, for example, Leociak 2021). The loud, disrespectful, offensive expressions of anger were not only an inevitable element of the street protests’ soundscape but became the main slogans of the entire movement: “fuck PiS” [jebać PiS] or its 8-star equivalent “***** ***” appeared on banners and “#fuck off” [#wypierdalać] became an acceptable response to anti-abortion and pro-government narratives. The prevalence and special position of vulgarisms and profanities in the language of protests should not be seen as a mere by-product of the emotional intensification of the demonstrators, but constitutes a deliberate decision to break communication, resulting from the frustration and weariness of the repetitive arguments used in the public debate on abortion. The assertion “It’s too late to talk” was repeated by many activists and reinforced by the protesting women shouting “we’ve already been polite”. Direct references to conflict appeared in slogans, such as “revolution is a woman” (see Pacewicz 2020).

6. Women’s Suffering

The recent protests brought about an important shift in a debate on abortion: from the focus on the ethical and moral evaluation of abortion to the status of women as subjects. “Now it’s not really just about abortion, it’s a protest about the loss of humanity”, asserted one of street protesters (quoted in Santora et al. 2020). In the post-communist Poland, the suffering of women was hijacked by the anti-abortion discourse and spoken about only in the context of negative psychological impact of abortion on women. The “post-abortion trauma” became an established term in the “abortion compromise dictionary” (Zimmerman 2021). The other side of the problem, namely the suffering of women who decided, or were forced to, give birth to children with lethal illnesses for a very long time was completely ignored. The turning point was the highly mediatized, so called, Chazan’s case. In 2014, Bogdan Chazan, a gynecologist and obstetrician working in a publicly funded hospital refused to help a woman who had a right to terminate the pregnancy due to severe and irreversible impairment of the fetus. He also delayed referral procedures to the point when she was no longer able to have the pregnancy terminated elsewhere. Media reporting on the case for the first time foregrounded the perspective of the suffering woman, rather than that of Church officials or politicians (Korolczuk 2020). During the protests under the Pope’s Window, a story of suffering was told by a woman who had been made to give birth to a dead child through deception on the part of doctors. The abortion “coming outs” were another important feature of these protests. Several women publicly talked about the abortions they had in the past, or carried placards stating that they underwent a pregnancy termination (see Grupowy Aborcyjny Coming Out 2020)8.

The women called upon by the “fatherland” to make sacrifices for the nation through their motherhood and accept suffering spoke up and rejected this historically sanctioned role. They used symbolic means which identified Catholicism as the main source of this construction of a Polish woman, and expressed strong opposition to the attempts of the Catholic Church to entrap women in this position through the use of discursive and legal means. By centering on both the psychological and corporeal suffering of women who experienced the difficult choices related to pregnancy termination, the protesters shuttered the idealized image of a passive woman-mother, devoid of her own agency and subjectivity and naturally predisposed to accept suffering and make sacrifices.

7. The Battle of Symbols

The COVID-19 crisis had a direct impact on the material and symbolic character of the protests. Some commentators argue that the government actions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic consisting of restricting rights and freedoms installed a form of quasi-militant democracy, largely based on populist rhetoric (Rak 2020)9. In the government’s narrative, those who do not agree with its policy are labeled as national enemies, threatening Polish interests (see also Kinowska-Mazaraki 2021), and the women’s protests were presented as a major factor contributing to the spread of the COVID-19 virus and used to justify the lack of success in controlling the pandemic and the introduction of new restrictions. The protests were negatively framed as illegal, endangering public health and opposed to the most fundamental moral principles. At the same time, the face masks required to be worn as one of the pandemic safety measures were used by many women as a medium of protests. Protesters used black masks to display red lightning bolts—the main symbol of the Women’s Strike (Batycka 2020). In the symbolic battles, right wing politicians linked the logo (created by Olga Jasionowska) and symbolizing women’s anger and power to the Nazis. During one of the sessions of the Parliament, on 18 November 2020, Jarosław Kaczyński addressed the present members of the Parliament wearing the masks: “First, take off the SS lightning bolts”. He continued his address by stating that the street demonstrations were illegal and “costed lives” of many people. “You have blood on your hands […] you should not be here in this chamber. You have committed crime”, said Kaczyński to the ovation by some and the dismay of other MPs (Kaczyński 2020). The government, represented here by the deputy prime minister, attempted to use the COVID-19 restrictions to demonize the protesters. Through emphasizing the threat related to mass gatherings and criminalizing the protests, the ruling party objectivized and legitimized the prosecution of those who faced charges for participation in the protests (Tilles 2020). Arguably, the treatment of citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic was markedly unequal. The pro-government assembles, such as the one organized by the ruling party as part of an anniversary of the Smoleńsk plane crash, or the meeting of the Polish Episcopate, were exempt from the ban on mass gatherings. The discursive references to crime, murder, and the Nazis were reserved solely for those who gathered to express their opposition to the government.

The link between the Nazi formations and the lightning bolt was also made by Archbishop Jędraszewski. In the interview for a weekly opinion magazine, “Do Rzeczy” Jędraszewski described the protests as demonic, “an eruption of aggressive evil”. Commenting on the decreasing intensity of protests, he expressed hope for a “return to rational thinking”, thus implying that the protesters were irrational. Notably, Jędraszewski foregrounded women as the protesters, ignoring the presence of men among the crowds. Further on in the interview, he emphasized a notion of an intergender conflict in his narrative on protesting women. 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”. As such, they were embodying demonic action that “rejects God, who destined women to marriage and, in consequence to motherhood”. Paradoxically, a similarly stereotypical view on female identity and agency was conveyed by the Marshal of the Senate Tomasz Grodzki, who, in his address concerning Women’s Strike, attempted to protect the protesting women against the attacks of the police and politicians:

Polish women deserve the utmost respect. I am deeply convinced that in the most difficult moments of our history it was them who—by cultivating language, tradition and customs—have been saving the identity of our nation. It is them who make our everyday life flow harmoniously and smoothly, in a kind of somewhat inconspicuous manner, and only when our grandmother, mother, wife, daughter or partner has to withdraw for some reason, we notice that without women our existence becomes difficult, dull and annoying.

(Grodzki 2020)

During the Women’s Strikes, Archbishop Jędraszewski categorically condemned any forms of protest organized in or around church buildings, dubbed “attacks on churches” (see Figurski 2020) and turned to priests with an exhortation to a spiritual battle (see Chojnowska 2020b). Although he did not explicitly call for “the defense of the churches”, some self-proclaimed “church defenders” appeared in front of the curia (see Ogórek 2020; Pitoń 2020b). In an interview for the DoRzeczy weekly, Jędraszewski expressed his appreciation for the men who gathered to oppose the Strike (Jędraszewski 2020, p. 26).

As the above examples illustrate, the symbolic struggle is played out on the plane of binary classification which puts men into the realm of rational warriors, whereas women are ascribed the position of sacrificial mater dolorosa who nurses the wounded, mourns the victims, and admires the victors (Ruddick 1989). The status of a woman-warrior, a figure evoked by the women talking about “revolution” and the political and Church elites likening them to Nazis, is highly problematic. Using violent language and going into a battle against the Church and the government, these women are seen as transgressing their position and thus revoking their feminine “identity”. In their striving to be heard, the protesters use both the “masculine” language of war and the “feminine” language of suffering, paradoxically, however, in the dominant pronatalist culture, they are denied both.

8. Conclusions

The Polish struggles over the reproductive rights discussed in this paper can be best understood in the international perspective. The Catholic Church has been opposing abortion since Pius IX in the 19th century; however, during the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis was much stronger on the birth control. The anti-abortion cause moved to the forefront in the 1980s and diverted the attention of the clergy from the widespread use of contraception. It is likely that this was a strategic response of the Church aimed at moving away from the fact that the majority of lay Catholics in the West ignored the ban on contraception (Miller 2014, pp. 90–91). In Poland, prior to 1989, the anti-abortion sermons were scarce, but they rapidly shifted to the forefront in the III Republic. The opposition to the anti-abortion crusade has also been significantly shaped by international developments. Back in the 1990s, while “pro-choice” was the slogan of the movement in North America, in Poland, the debate evolved around the rights of medical doctors to exercise their professional judgement. Since the feminist voice was so weak at the time, a great deal of the opposition to the “compromise” of 1993 was expressed in terms of the freedom of doctors to determine on a case-by-case what was best (see Holc 1997). Therefore, in the 1990s, the misogynistic and paternalistic discourses were produced by those who fought for the restriction of abortion law and those who opposed it. However, in the 21st century, the international pro-choice slogans gradually reshaped the conversation in Poland, so that, nowadays, the protesters in the Women’s Strike make arguments that resonate powerfully throughout the EU, and among feminists the world over.

The distinctive local feature of the slogans of the “Women’s Strike” is the appropriation of religious language. The protests reclaim religious language monopolized by the Church and use it against the dominant religious institution. Importantly, it is specifically the Catholic Church in Poland, and its political position that are most fiercely opposed. The local Church is contrasted with the universal Christian message, as was poignantly expressed on one of the slogans from the protest in front of the Kraków curia in 2019: “Pole-Catholic, be a Christian!” [Polaku-katoliku, bądź chrześcijaninem!] (Gazeta Krakowska 2019b).

The Women’s Strike and the protests of 2020/21 in Kraków are exceptional in many ways. The mass mobilization discussed here constitutes Poland’s biggest civil resistance movement since the Solidarity Movement of the 1980s that played the leading part in the process of political democratization and transition of power. This popular movement that originated in trade unionism “shook and delegitimized the communist regime by exposing its ideological but false claims of being a free ‘workers’ state’” (Bartkowski 2009). As our research indicates, the Women’s Strike strives to fulfill a similar function by facilitating the shift in the position of women who—regardless of the social appreciation for their culturally prescribed roles as mothers and caretakers—remain powerless and invisible in the public and political arena.

Moreover, the Women’s Strike is also a first mass manifestation of the protest against the political engagement of the Catholic Church in Poland and its hegemonic position within the domain of value judgements and moral issues. As Agnieszka Graff stated: “it was a revolution—the changes in the mentality are irreversible (…) we no longer treat the Church as a monopolist in the realm of values. It’s over.” (Graff 2021). Her opinion has been substantiated by the recent Pew Research Center data, according to which 70% of Poles consider that religion should be kept separate from government politics, with 25% supporting the view that government should be involved in supporting religious values and beliefs (Pew Research Center 2018).

Most importantly, it was not the religion itself that was deprecated or rejected by the protesters. Religiosity of the Episcopate and its lay followers has been subjected to very strong criticism; there were accusations of hypocrisy, non-observance of God’s commandments, and deviation from the Gospel. Not only the position of the official Roman Catholic Church in Poland, but also some of the expressions used by its opponents exemplify the function of religion as a “conversation stopper” (Rorty [1994] 1999) or a form of “communication-avoidance communication“ (Luhmann [1997] 2012, p. 141). As our case study shows, religion enters or even shapes a discourse when it comes to value conflicts that cannot be resolved otherwise.