religions Article The Battle for Symbolic Power: Kraków as a Stage of Renegotiation of the Social Position of the Catholic Church in Poland Dominika Motak 1,* , Joanna Krotofil 1,* and Dorota Wójciak 2 1 Institute for the Studies of Religion, Jagiellonian University, 31007 Kraków, Poland 2 Doctoral School in the Humanities, Jagiellonian University, 31007 Kraków, Poland; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] (D.M.); joanna.krotofi[email protected] (J.K.) 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 Citation: Motak, Dominika, Joanna transformation of the Catholic landscape in Poland. Krotofil, and Dorota Wójciak. 2021. The Battle for Symbolic Power: Keywords: Catholic Church; abortion; crisis; women’s strike; protests Kraków as a Stage of Renegotiation of the Social Position of the Catholic Church in Poland. Religions 12: 594. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12080594 1. Introduction Academic Editor: Malachi Hacohen 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 Received: 30 June 2021 debates as well as political and academic discourses. Although the level of identification Accepted: 27 July 2021 with the Catholic Church in Poland has been gradually declining in the last three decades Published: 31 July 2021 (Baniak 2011; Maria´nski 2018; Mandes and Rogaczewska 2013), the persisting overwhelm- ing dominance of the Church remains baffling to many observers. At times, this results in Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral orientalist framings of Polish public religiosity as “unique, atavistic, not-quite European”, with regard to jurisdictional claims in a perspective criticized by Porter-Sz˝ucs(2011, p. 15). In 2020, the unrelenting pressure published maps and institutional affil- of Church hierarchs and Catholic pro-life organizations in Poland led to tightening what iations. 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 Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. against the Catholic Church in Poland. The mass protests began in October 2020, as an Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. immediate reaction to the decision of the Constitutional Tribunal, which declared one of This article is an open access article the three exceptions allowing legal abortion in Poland unconstitutional. As consequence distributed under the terms and of this ruling, abortion, in cases where prenatal tests indicate a high probability of severe conditions of the Creative Commons and irreversible impairment of the fetus or an incurable life-threatening disease, is no Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// longer permissible. Following this announcement, thousands of people took to the streets creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ to participate in what became known as “the Women’s Strikes”. These mass protests were 4.0/). Religions 2021, 12, 594. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12080594 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2021, 12, 594 2 of 18 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 con- sidered 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 Religions 2021, 12, 594 3 of 18 Kraków’s metropolitan, Archbishop Marek J˛edraszewski.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-Sz˝ucs(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 insti- tutional 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.