The besieged fortress? Urban, highly educated and highly religious: female members of Catholic groups in contemporary Poland

ABSTRACT

This paper sheds light on the feelings of exclusion and insecurity among female members of Catholic groups in contemporary Poland. It is based on data gathered in the years 2019–2020 within the research project Resistance and Subordination. Religious Agency of Roman Catholic Women in Poland, which involved 48 in-depth interviews with university-educated Catholic women living in large Polish cities and engaged in various religious groups. The conducted analysis indicates that the interviewees resorted to defensive actions, representing a cultural backlash. Taking into consideration the numerical and institutional dominance of Roman Catholicism in Poland, the overarching question of the paper is: why do the interviewed women feel excluded and at what or at whom is their resentment directed? The analysis draws upon a wider discussion on the ongoing ideological polarisation of contemporary societies, showing the case of a country that is religiously homogenous. The interviewed women recognise some external threats, such as liberal culture and feminism, but also internal ones, namely ritualised, habitual, ‘mainstream’ Catholicism.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural backlash
• Poland
• Catholicism
• women
• female religious groups

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The rising prevalence of social media has further contributed to the emergence of polarised and emotionally charged discourses. For instance, ‘opinionated social media journalism’ has deepened the ideological cleavages, which manifests, among others, in ‘hashtag wars’ on Twitter (Bossetta, Segesten, and Trenz 2017, 67). The development of the internet has also enhanced ‘the segmentation of media audiences’, which results in enclosing users in ‘echo chambers’ rather than enabling them access to a public sphere and democratic debate (Surowiec and Štetka 2018, 10).

2. Being ‘religious’ does not necessarily mean being Catholic; usually large social surveys held in Poland do not specify this question on religiosity.

3. The number of apostasies in Poland is on the rise. In 2010 the Roman Catholic Church stopped providing any official numbers, because, as it argued, ‘the scale of the phenomenon is too small’. Now, however, church representatives admit that the numbers are rising dynamically. In 2010, the total number of apostasies in Poland was 459 (https://www.iskk.pl/badania/religijnosc/303-statystyki-nt-apostazji-w-polsce). In 2020, in the Kraków archdiocese alone it was 445, as reported by Archbishop Jędraszewski (Archidiecezja Krakowska 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Centre, Poland. The article is a result of the research project ‘Resistance and Subordination. Religious Agency of Roman Catholic Women in Poland’ [UMO-2017/26/D/HS6/00125].