A war on gender? : the Roman Catholic Church’s discourse on gender in Poland

In 2012, the governmental and parliamentary discussions around the ratification of the Council’s of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence stirred wave of negative reactions from the Roman Catholic Church representatives in Poland. In our view, these interventions offer an interesting case for studying the presence of religious actors in the public sphere and democratic society. The chapter analyses the arguments used by the representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in their official accounts of "gender" and "gender ideology" with a twofold aim. We reconstruct the Church’s official discourse and use the findings to engage in the discussion on intersections between (public) religion, gender (equality), and politics in the Polish context. The analytical section follows an introduction to the theoretical considerations on the intersections between religion, politics and gender, and presentation of the Polish context with the overview of the analysed materials.