“It no longer holds any power over me.” Resistance to the Roman Catholic Church in Poland and the patriarchal family as part of the Polish Women's Strikes after 2020.

On 22 October 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal, chaired by Julia Przyłębska, declares that any termination of pregnancy due to fetal genetic defects or other deformations of an embryo should be illegal – it means that abortion in Poland is de facto prohibited. This gave rise to another wave of Women's Strikes, a grassroots social movement that fights for reproductive rights in Poland. These events have been going on with varying intensity since 2016. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and numerous restrictions - including the ban on political demonstrations - thousands of citizens took to the streets with the main slogan "f *** off" ("wy***rdalaj") on their lips. The grassroots activities of the opposition took place on an unprecedented scale: thousands of people in large cities, but also in towns and villages, where such civic activities were often held for the first time. They marched to places associated with oppressive power: to the seats of state authorities, parliamentary offices of Law and Justice (pol. Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – the rulling party), and... to churches. The scale of the anticlerical protests shocked even the protesters themselves, and some forms of resistance sparked controversy in public opinion. This greatest civic mobilization to date, both toward secular authorities and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, is the starting point for our speech. Based on our research, during which we conducted biographical and narrative interviews with people participating in Women's Strikes, who indicated resistance to the Catholic Church in Poland and/or the patriarchal family as a motivation for this act. On their basis, we are looking for answers, among other questions: 1. What dilemmas do people who resist the institutions face? 2. What are the motives of protesting women against obeying the church and the patriarchal family and how do they manifest it? 3. What values passed on to them in the process of socialization turned out to be a paradox? 4. How can exclusion from one social group turn into inclusion in another social group? We present how the narrators declare obedience to the Church and their own patriarchal family, what the motives for their involvement are and what importance they assign to it. When we explain how it is possible that in a country where more than 90% of Poles have declared themselves Catholic, there may have been a nationwide rebellion against the Church, we shall first rely on the idea of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, as well as the resistance and related denunciation of a hidden protocol as understood by James Scott. It is women who break the division between the hidden and public protocol and declare obedience to both the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church and all habituses, cultural norms, and the way of thinking passed on during primary socialization (primarily in the family, school, church). This resulted in them being permanently excluded from the habitus-based community of the Roman Catholic Church but becoming part of the protesting community.