Between Online Autonomy and Local Constraints: Spaces of Roman Catholic Women’s Activity in Poland

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Various research on women and religion shows irrefutably that religions, including conservative ones, can nonetheless be an area in which women have agency, both individual and collective (Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015). The intensive growth in research on the mutual relations between the media and religion in recent years seems only to reinforce this idea (Lövheim 2016). Regarding gender, digital communities can figure as spaces that empower women by allowing them more freedom in creating their own religious identities, generating new or hybrid practices, and especially acquiring at least partial independence from the influences of conservative religious institutions. Although digital or networked religion (Campbell 2013) can certainly be perceived from the angle of creativity, negotiation, or autonomy, there is a very complex relationship between that which is generated at the grassroots level by engaged actors and top-down impositions from institutions, as well as between occurrences in the online and offline space (Campbell 2012).

This article is based on the results of research which I conducted in 2019–2020 within the community of Polish Roman Catholic women known as Captivating (Urzekająca), who combine work in the online space with local activity in Catholic parishes in Poland. The example of this case demonstrates how the online space is used to build a women's community, which retains a creative approach to practices, renegotiating power relations, and constructing a sense of agency among women, while also acknowledging the authority of the Church as an institution. At the same time, I show that, while the community possesses considerable autonomy in defining its objectives and practising online religion, in the offline space the characteristics of the local Church in Poland mean that it encounters restrictions. Yet the community is not entirely radical. In the processes of navigating in the local structures, it benefits from networking and resources generated through online activity. As a result, this type of hybrid community format generates a semi-autonomous space of women's religious activity, which is neither fully dependent on a religious institution, nor entirely controlled by it.

This study combines the perspective of research on women and religions with an analysis of the processes of mediatization of religion and the phenomenon of networked religion. Although the topic of the relationship between online and offline activity is raised quite often in literature (Campbell 2012; Campbell and Evolvi 2020; Lövheim and Campbell 2017), the case I analyze places it squarely in the center—the hybrid nature of the women's community I examine is its characteristic feature. The analysis also emphasizes the broader institutional context. Whereas many analyses of mediatization of religion refer to the situation of the countries of Western or Northern Europe, and thus largely secularized countries, or to the context of the pluralistic United States, my study is embedded in the realities of a country with one dominant religion, and moreover one that retains a strongly institutional makeup. Taking this particular context into account provides the opportunity for examining women's practising of religion (Ammerman 2020) from an additional perspective.

Theoretical Framework: Women, Religion, and Digital Environments

The last three decades have brought intensive development of research on women and religions, generating a sizable body of knowledge. During the development of this branch of research, the perspective adopted by researchers has evolved. Initially, therefore, especially in reference to conservative religions, religious engagement of women was interpreted as a form of “false consciousness” (Avishai 2008:411; Bracke 2003:337; Irby 2014:1269) and they were regarded as passive victims of patriarchal religious structures. The turn towards agency provided nuance to this perspective, portraying religious women as conscious agents (Avishai 2016:265–268). The interpretation of women's religious involvement has also evolved, from understanding their agency in terms of resistance to religious orders to a broad comprehension encompassing such forms of activity that may be based on subordination to religious rules (Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015; cf. Mahmood 2005). At the same time, research on conservative women shows that they often negotiate and reinterpret the religious rules delivered by institutions, including in the form of gender ideologies, as well as combining them with secular inspirations (cf. Ingersoll 2003 on “creative blending”; Burke and McDowell 2021; Griffith 1997). However, this negotiating does not necessarily denote perceptible changes in the structure (cf. Mahmood 2001; Kościańska 2009), but also sustains the religious status quo. Moreover, even if the actions result in some perceptible change, this does not necessarily mean that it was the actors' intended objective.

Researchers analyze the aforementioned practices of subordination, reinterpretation, and resistance to religious rules from the point of view of both the individual experience (e.g., Avishai 2008; Darwin 2018) and the collective actions of women, including religious movements, communities, and networks. This group perspective is present, among others, in the research of Burke and McDowell (2012; 2021), Griffith (1997), and Mahmood (2005). Moreover, the cases analyzed by the latter have one more common empirical element: the presence of the media in group practices (e.g., communal watching of DVD lessons in Beth Moore's biblical study groups, the activity of the IF evangelical organization in social media). This connection between religious, individual, or collective practices, and the media—or more broadly, the processes of mediatization of religion—is at present an important topic in research on women and religion, albeit one that is only now developing.

Mediatization is most commonly understood to mean the processes within which various areas of social life, including religion, become dependent on the logic of the media (Hjarvard 2008; Hjarvard 2011). In the case of religion, one consequence of mediatization is the fact that the media become the main source of information about religious issues, as well as taking over the role hitherto played by religious institutions, including in the areas of spiritual guidance, ritual passages, and a sense of community and belonging (Hjarvard 2011:124). Lövheim (2016:19), however, points out that mediatization is a two-way process in which religion not only changes, but also moulds the media in such a way as to adapt it to its dynamics. She argues that the agency and changes generated in the processes of mediatization are a combination of the effects of media technologies, institutional practices, and individual actions, but also the specific contexts in which they are realized.

In research on women and religion, these transformation processes are usually considered in terms of the opportunities they can provide to women. Media spaces, and especially digital ones, are perceived as being conducive to women acting with agency. Lövheim (2016:20–21) outlines the potential directions of change, showing that mediatization can; for example, gradually weaken the influence of traditional religious institutions on defining women's roles, and in return help to create spaces in which it will be possible to negotiate these roles. One outcome of mediatization might also be the generation of looser forms of religious communities concentrated around lifestyles in which the capacity for emotional expression, culturally associated with women, is particularly important. Researchers see the media as environments (Meyrowitz 1993), and especially digital media, as spaces of women's agency and empowerment, permitting them to undertake activities customarily assigned within a given religious tradition to men (Piela 2010; Piela 2011), to shape their identities more autonomously (Campbell and Evolvi 2020:4–5), etc. Nonetheless, although digital media weaken the traditional forms of religious control from institutions, this does not mean that they do not generate new forms, to which women's actions are subordinated (Lövheim and Lundmark 2019). One way in which control is exercised is by audiences, who are frequently critical of public religious activity of women, for instance accusing them of heresy or self-promotion (Klassen and Lofton 2013).

Studies show that digital communities create new conditions not only for religious women to operate in, but also more widely for various individual and collective actors. Religion that is lived (McGuire 2008) online leads to modification of religious practices in a broad sense and various dimensions, such as ritual, community, and identity (Campbell 2013). Campbell and Garner (2016:65) propose the term “networked religion,” which places practising of religion online in the center of its interest, but also combines it with religion offline and embeds it in the networked character of contemporary societies. The characteristic traits of networked religion are a networked community, storied identities, convergent practices, shifting authority, and multisite reality.

Online religious communities essentially operate as communities of interests, meanings, symbols, and support, in which participation is confirmed by active engagement, and not formal membership or joining rituals. However, studies prove that belonging to an online community is rather a supplement to offline religious engagement than a substitute for it, and that consequently people satisfy their religious needs by participating in various types of communities at once (Campbell 2012:69). Religious practices undertaken online by individuals and groups are convergent owing to the very nature of digital media, which can be used to access various sources, both religious and nonreligious, and to experiment. This also makes it possible to construct individual identities based on conscious performance, selection of meanings, and narratives. These and other practices create something like “third spaces” (Hoover and Echchaibi 2014) in the digital space, which are characterized by creativity and autonomy, based on a reflexive approach to participants' engagement. Their generative character also results from their hybrid nature, suspended “between” the private and the public, the institutional and the individual, and the local and the translocal (Hoover and Echchaibi 2014:20).

Networked religion is also linked to transformation of authority and the possibility of negotiating the power hierarchies present in the offline context. Digital media appoint “instant experts,” whose recognition comes not from long-term formation, but knowledge and competences manifested in online activities (Campbell 2012:74; cf. Kołodziejska and Arat 2017). Yet transformation of power relations is not only a question about who exercises power, but also what its nature is. Digital media favor leadership based on charisma and consensus (Giorgi 2019:3), as well as authenticity and relations with recipients (Lövheim and Lundmark 2019), rather than formal legitimization. As research by Kołodziejska and Arat (2017) reveals, however, these bottom-up forms of production of authority need not necessarily rule out the presence of more traditional, top-down forms in the digital space. The position of informal online experts might be caused, for instance, by recognition of their competences associated with familiarity with the doctrine of a religious institution. The consequence is that digital religion can strengthen both positions questioning the official religious views and those that reproduce the institutional status quo.

Although religion in the digital space is to a great extent characterized by the concepts of creativity, negotiation, and autonomy, this does not mean that it is entirely detached from the offline context. The latest research on media and religion emphasizes the relationship between online and offline (Lövheim and Campbell 2017), pointing to their mutual conversation and entanglement in all aforementioned dimensions of networked religion, such as the functioning of communities, creating identities, or how people understand and construct religious practices. Religion is lived simultaneously on Facebook and Instagram, in blogs and on YouTube, and in various online communities, but also in the realities of a specific country, town, or parish shaped by the local context.

The Context of Roman Catholicism in Poland

To fully understand the phenomenon of the community I examined, it is essential to place it in a broader local context, formed, on the one hand, by the specific nature of Roman Catholicism and religiosity in Poland, and on the other, by processes of change related to redefinition of women's roles and rights and negotiating the place of religion in Polish society. Ammerman (2020) notes that analysis of religious practices should always consider structural determinants and address the specific contexts in which religion operates. The Polish case is quite a good fit for the model she describes, in which an organized established religious tradition exists and where “the rituals and traditions of majority religious culture are pervasively present” (Ammerman 2020:35). Roman Catholicism in Poland is not only the majority religion in a statistical sense—for many years, more than 90% of Poles have declared themselves to be Catholics (Borowik 2017:35)—but also the dominant one in cultural terms. The country's unique historical circumstances—including partitions in the nineteenth century, during which the ethnic foreignness of the invaders overlapped with religious foreignness, as well as the Church's opposition role during the communist era—contributed to consolidating the links between Catholicism and the Polish nation and state. The “Catholic Pole” stereotype, or the concept of “Catholicisation of the nation” (Zubrzycki 2006) present in the literature conveys this connection well. In terms of gender, it takes the form of “Mother-Pole”—a set of normative expectations made of Polish women, based on individual sacrifice, responsibility for raising children, and serving as a reservoir for national and religious values. Catholicism in Poland is therefore not only a question of individual affiliation, but also a component of nationalism.

One of the consequences of these intricacies is the Church's current engagement in politics and activity in the public sphere. Since the democratic breakthrough in 1989, the Church has been an important actor in public discussions concerning such issues as reproduction and women's rights (e.g., abortion, IVF, violence towards women), as well as seeking to influence legislation in these areas (Szwed and Zielińska 2017). Since 2015, and the electoral victory of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, the Church's influence on politics has been even more discernible, and in recent years it has also been supported by civic organizations with religious inspirations framing conservative social demands (cf. Vaggione 2005 on NGOization of religious actors).

This strong position of the Church as an institution in the public sphere has also been accompanied by a particular model of intra-Church relations. Polish Catholicism has been characterized by a significant role not only of bishops, but also of diocesan priests. The shape of parish life has to a great extent been dependent on the subjective visions and decisions made by local priests. In smaller villages and towns, the parish priest also has a major influence on the local community. Owing to the historical circumstances in Poland, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which envisaged stronger involvement of lay people in the activities of the Church and decision-making processes, were only introduced to a limited degree. Polish Catholics have only relatively recently begun to discuss the role of lay people and to question the clerical model of the Church, which has been one of the manifestations of changes in ecclesiological thinking.

This particular role of diocesan priests in shaping the reality of the parish also has consequences for how women function within it. Quantitative research on religiosity has been showing for years that in Poland it is women who comprise the “majority in the Church,” in the sense that they are more likely to identify as “devout believers,” are more orthodox in their beliefs than men, and predominate among the participants in Sunday Mass (Instytut Statystyki Kościoła Katolickiego 2015). Priests perceive women's religious engagement as natural, yet at the same time, it is often questioned as being rather shallow, characterized by superficial, emotional piety (Szwed 2015:254–256). At the parish level, priests have a specific way of framing women's group forms of activity. They regard groups focusing on conventional religious practices (e.g., Rosary groups), charity, and organizational work in the parish as widespread as well as desirable. Meanwhile, lay women are as a rule not permitted to fulfill the role of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion in Poland, and in many parishes, girls are also barred from altar service, which is regarded as being a role for boys (Szwed 2015).

The context which I describe in this part of the article, however, is not only the status quo, but also the process of change. Three changes seem important for setting the scene for Captivating. The first concerns the discernible transformations that have been taking place in recent years in the religiosity of Poles, and particularly young people. Research by the Pew Research Centre shows that intergenerational differences in religiosity in Poland are among the biggest in the world (Kramer and Fahmy 2018). The younger generations are considerably less religious and more critical of the Church as an institution. Researchers also point to certain symptoms of changes in the religiosity of women, one indicator of which is the declining regularity of religious practices (Borowik 2017). The second process is not directly linked to religion, although indirectly it also refers to the models of gender relations proposed by the Church. Despite calls for retraditionalization in the political sphere in recent years, Polish opinions on gender equality, in both the public and the private sphere, are increasingly egalitarian. Furthermore, women's views show more support for equality than those of men, whose views are changing slightly more slowly (CBOS 2017). The last area of changes I would like to point to is placed on the intersection between women's rights and the role played by the Church in Poland. In 2016–2020, Poland became the arena of mass women's protests against the tightening of already restrictive abortion law. The so-called “Black Protests” are not only interpreted as a struggle for women's rights; their role in regaining agency by Polish women is also accentuated (Nawojski, Pluta, and Zielińska 2018). Yet the mass mobilizations of the Women's Strike in autumn 2020, when a Constitutional Tribunal ruling made abortion impossible for embryopathological reasons, also had another significant dimension. The discourse of the protests placed a strong emphasis on anticlerical motifs and made clear demands for the withdrawal of the Church from the public sphere and limitation of its influence on politics and lawmaking. A symbolic instrument of resistance to the hegemony of the Church became publicly declared acts of apostasy, and a relative increase was indeed recorded in Church statistics (Waluś 2021).

The Captivating community analyzed in this article, therefore, came about and is developing in a unique cultural and historical context. On the one hand, in Poland Roman Catholicism is the majority religion, the Church as an institution retains a relatively strong position, and society continues to essentially hold a traditional view of the role of women in the Church. On the other hand, there are visible signs of secularization of the younger generations, while women manifest more egalitarian views and are able to demonstrate agency in mobilizing for their rights, even when this requires the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church to be questioned. It is in this extremely tense context that Captivating functions, a conservative community formed on the initiative of women and for women, which seeks to find a place—or rather forge one for itself within the Church—between the space of online flows and the Church's local structures.

Captivating: A Conservative Community for Modern Catholic Women

The beginnings of Captivating date back to 2016 with a conference for women using this name, and aimed at the time not only at Catholics, but also more generally at Christian women. One of its organizers—the community's current leader—declares that the idea of organizing the first conference came about in response to the activities of the Congress of Women, a Polish women's movement with feminist sympathies. The Captivating community was supposed to fill a gap in the market for modern, religious women who do not agree to the “world without values,” dominated, according to my interlocutor, by independence and the primacy of deciding for themselves, and where the traditional family is negated and feminism and abortion are promoted.

The idea of establishing this ultimately Catholic community is therefore at least partly connected with a backlash against women's movements, including feminist ones, that are growing in strength in Polish society. In this context, it is worth noting that Captivating is developing almost in parallel, albeit in opposition, to the aforementioned waves of women's protests against the tightening of the abortion law in Poland, which also began in 2016. Anti-abortion ideas, incidentally, are visible in Captivating's activity: part of the income from membership fees in the Captivating Club is allocated to a foundation aiming to prevent abortion, while Captivating also supports annual Marches for Life and Family and other pro-life movement events.

While discussing the origins of Captivating, it is also worth mentioning its transnational inspirations, mainly from Protestant circles. The very name of the community is an allusion to the title of Protestant authors John and Stasi Eldredge's book Captivating (Eldredge and Eldredge 2005). In public statements, the group's founder often mentions an event that proved to be a watershed for her, when she participated in a workshop in the United States led by Stasi Eldredge. She also frequently expresses her interest in American conservative movements. This conservative aspect in the work of Captivating is manifested in an emphasis on the importance of the role of the mother and wife, support for large families, and women's right not to work outside the home—although this does not mean that all the women involved in the community actually pursue this model.

Apart from providing a different option for conservatives, Captivating was also supposed to fill a gap in what the Church offers to women, particularly middle-aged or younger, mainly residents of cities and large representatives of the middle class. The movement places a strong emphasis on its Catholicity and relations with the Church, and therefore does not aspire to resist this institution. The community addresses its message to women who do not reject the trappings of modernity but want to remain religious. At the same time, they do not identify with the traditional models of Catholicism in Poland, entailing a vision of femininity based on sacrifice for others, concentration solely on spirituality, and ignoring the bodily dimension. Captivating aims not only to deepen the religiosity of its members, but also to encourage their personal development in an individualistic spirit. The practices proposed to women, therefore, combine conventional religious activities with elements of coaching, self-development courses, and care for the body.

Captivating's hybrid nature is also expressed in its operational format. During the research period, this was based on a combination of online and offline activity. In social media, Captivating was mainly based around a public Facebook page with more than 61,500 followers at the time (May 2020), as well as a closed Facebook group with almost 3,200 members.¹ In the first half of 2020, the Captivating Club was founded, providing access to online courses, webinars, and group discussions through a mobile app. The women of Captivating were also organized in local groups operating in more than 30 places, mainly cities, in Poland. The community was characterized by diverse forms of activity including social media, meetings, and online courses in personal and spiritual development, annual national conferences for Catholic women, women's retreats, local group meetings, women's Mass, etc.

Although Captivating is not the only community of Catholic women in Poland operating online, its hybrid format, combining internet-based activity and work in local groups, along with its large reach, make it a particularly interesting case to analyze. As I try to show in the next part of the article, this hybrid nature also generates serious consequences for the community's operation, as well as for navigating in the structures of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland.

METHODOLOGY

I began my research at Captivating, after an initial online reconnaissance lasting several weeks, by participating in the national Captivating conference in March 2019. As part of this, I carried out participant observation, listening throughout the day to speeches by community leaders and invited guests, participating in Mass, and speaking informally to other participants. I recorded my observations as field notes. The conference also presented me with the chance to meet Captivating's founder and secure tentative permission for my research activities.

From March 2019 to May 2020, I carried out online ethnography, systematically tracking the goings-on of both groups of the community on Facebook. In the relevant period, excluding two-week-long breaks, each day I monitored the new posts that appeared, as well as the discussions accompanying them. I decided to treat them as “conversations” that I was “listening in on” as a researcher, while also keeping field notes. This meant deciding against another possible approach, based on systematic coding and content analysis of the published posts. Bearing in mind the huge amount of material generated, this would have entailed a need to sample that would have limited the number of threads analyzed or reduced the research to selected time intervals. This would have made it difficult to gain an overview of the activities undertaken within the community. Owing to the overall objectives of the research project, part of which was ethnography of Captivating, my observations were targeted, among other things, at the ways in which the community delivers rules and ways of influencing women's activities in everyday life (e.g., in the context of the family, reconciling family and professional roles, intimacy and embodiment, etc.), as well as recognising the practices within which gender and religion are done (cf. Avishai 2008; Darwin 2018). I was also interested in the internal rules concerning the community's activity, ways of constructing authority, and the attitude towards the Church as an institution.

As part of my study, I also analyzed the contents of group emails, video materials, online meetings (weekly “online coffees”), photographs (Instagram and Facebook), and selected online courses. I chose for the analysis courses that seemed crucial for understanding the ideology of the group (e.g., “The Foundation of Captivating,” “The Subjected Captivating,” “Complete Femininity”), as well as those in which members were particularly interested at the time (e.g., on beauty, gratitude, and Mary, mother of Jesus).

From December 2019, I conducted a participant observation in one local group, participating in women's Mass and meetings held in one parish (during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, communication between members of the local group moved online). In late 2019, I took part in the national leaders' meetings. This gave me the chance to meet the women heading local groups and gain more detailed information about their work. I collected the data both during informal conversations and with the aid of a survey, which 21 people completed. Among the questions I asked were some about the characteristics of the local group, what the leaders thought attracted women to the group, cooperation with the parish priest, challenges associated with leading a group, and a general assessment of the situation of women in the Church.

In the article, I also use data obtained from individual interviews held in 2019 and 2020 with the founder of the community and eight local group leaders.² The interviews gave me insight into the workings of the local groups, including their individual peculiarities, relations with priests, the initiatives they have undertaken, difficulties faced in their activities, but also the leaders' personal engagement in Captivating. The individual interviews were recorded and transcribed. As with the other materials, such as contents of online courses, mailshots, but also field notes compiled during observation of the participants, they were coded and analyzed using MAXQDA software.

I obtained permission to carry out the research from the founder of the group (who also publicly communicated this information in the community). The local leader of the group in which I conducted participant observation and the women I interviewed individually also gave their consent. At all the face-to-face meetings (local group and leaders as well as the conference), where technically possible, I revealed my researcher identity. In the article, I only quote materials made publicly available in various types of media and comments of people who consciously agreed to be quoted (IDI). For ethical reasons, I decided not to include quotations from the statements of community members made in online groups, as the option of searching by content does not guarantee them anonymity.

Finally, there is one more aspect I would like to mention concerning the research: my positionality as a researcher. I conducted the research at Captivating as an outsider, without any previous connections to the community and not knowing anybody who might introduce me to them. I formed all my contacts with members of Captivating using Facebook Messenger or directly at meetings, encountering a large amount of openness and fundamental willingness to take part in the research. I was certainly aided in entering the community and better understanding the practices of the women involved in it by my Catholic background, having been raised in a Catholic family and undergone Catholic socialization (cf. Neitz 2013). On the other hand, my identity as a now nonreligious person and researcher with a feminist orientation at times generated various kinds of internal tensions when researching the conservative, women's community that Captivating is (cf. Avishai, Gerber, and Randles 2013; Chong 2008). I treat these potential obstacles, similarly to the facilitations mentioned previously, as factors favoring reflexivity and research sensitivity, rather than limitations in the research.

ONLINE AUTONOMY: CREATING A SPACE OF THEIR OWN

In the period when I was conducting the research, Captivating was functioning as a hybrid community in which social media were a significant space of operation. Similarly to other online communities, Captivating has characteristics of a loose social network in which membership is based on sharing certain values, a subjective sense of belonging and active engagement in the group, particularly through conversation (Campbell and Garner 2016:65). The costs of entering and leaving the community are low—to become a member, it is essentially sufficient to simply join the Facebook group (a fee is only payable for membership in the Captivating Club, which guarantees access to courses in the application, etc.). The ease of joining and abandoning the community results, of course, in various levels of engagement among the group members, which can be superficial, partial, or temporary. Interestingly, the women see this differentiated and sometimes individually fluctuating engagement as a positive. Captivating is not a conventional structure or a group in which members are required to attend regular meetings at a specific time and place. This allows its members to join and leave in a safe and acceptable manner, depending on their current professional or family commitments. Unlike in religious communities and small groups, much of the individual activity remains beyond the control of the community, and its identity is produced in a narrative (Campbell 2012:71–74), which means that those aspects of life that constitute a challenge from the perspective of Church doctrine (e.g., living in a nonsacramental union, failure to abide by the rules of Catholic sexual ethics, etc.) can be either hidden or “related” appropriately to avoid negative appraisal.

The independence of engagement from physical place typical of an online community becomes an additional, often reflexive, virtue. In comments in the Facebook group, women describe unsuccessful searches for women's communities in parishes, as well as referring to the secular environment in which they function (e.g., after emigration, at work, in large cities), which denies them contact with “women with similar values.” The community's online nature means that people from smaller communities either lacking or with more conventionally defined religious initiatives for women are also able to join. Although the lack of dependence on place, a kind of “globality,” plays a positive role at Captivating, this is not to say that locality is insignificant. References to locality (“Where are you from?” “Are there any members here from X?”), are important in the context of formation of offline Captivating groups—discussed in the next part of the article—but also have a symbolic function for making individual experiences communal (e.g., being a religious woman in the countryside or post-emigration, practising one's religiosity in specific places, etc.). Captivating's glocal nature is manifested through these practices.

Media and technologies in Captivating are not only a means of communication between members or a channel for the founder to transmit contents to the women engaged in the community, but also constitute an environment of lived religious practices. The women of Captivating do not reject conventional religious practices such as prayer, fasting, or the Eucharist, but at the same time the community becomes a source of inspiration for creating new, often creative ways of manifesting one's religiosity. The Facebook group, for example, was used for a campaign entitled “SPA,” an acronym standing for the Polish words meaning “confession – fasting – adoration,” with the women using a shared file to record the days when they undertook fasting and adoration in a common intention. During Lent and Advent, community members could take part in so-called Challenges, which involved completing tasks sent daily by Messenger. During the COVID-19 lockdown, joint online Rosaries and short daily meetings called “Anti-crisis 15 minutes” were held using the Captivating application.

It is not only the form of Captivating's message that is distinctive, however. For many women, it also delivers new contents that redefine the sense of their own value and the idea of the relationship between women or the vision of the relationship with God. A key metaphor that appears very often in the comments of women involved in the community and its materials is being the “daughter of the King of kings.” This functions as a synonym of women's strength, dignity, being respected, and loved (“God wanted me as I am”), and for the women using it constitutes a legitimation of activities undertaken individually and collectively. My interlocutor discusses the way in which Captivating breaks down traditional ideas as follows:

In an ordinary church group, […] there is […] a kind of traditional religiosity. I don’t mean that traditional is bad. Because generally this religiosity gives us a certain framework […] But what was very much lacking for me there was a personal relationship with the Lord […] and a simple answer to my needs. I mean generally the Lord is normally not presented in the Church as a truly loving Father. I also have a very big problem with this, with this relationship. Because I have a very poor relationship with my father […] But what we get at Captivating in these contents, gosh, it’s a completely different, fresh breath. Completely as if the world was turned upside down, everything you’ve experienced and learned before. [Dominika]

Captivating's online activity is shaped, on the one hand, by topics proposed by the group's founder, and on the other by the activity of individual women who raise problems important to them, concerning such issues as spiritual development, religious practices, marital life, and raising children. Conversations on daily routines and the crises appearing in them feature negotiations of the meanings of religious aspects, and understandings of rules and practices. These include whether attractive clothing can be a part of religious femininity, the status of a relationship when the husband has left for another woman with whom he has a child, and whether it is acceptable to pray while breastfeeding or ironing.

These discursive practices in social media also generate changes concerning religious authority. Captivating as an online community is not subject to any formal control from priests, although of course the public or semipublic nature of communication means that events in the group can also be followed by people who are not directly involved (cf. Campbell 2012). An important role in the processes of defining meanings and confirming their Catholicity is certainly played by the group founder, who makes it clear that views overtly opposed to Roman Catholic Church teaching are not accepted in the Captivating community. But the legitimacy of specific opinions and practices is also generated in group conversations, in which women correct each other or become experts for one another. These mechanisms may concern doctrinal issues, such as recognition of a marriage's invalidity, but also practical ones, such as preparation for the act of entrustment to Mary or natural family planning methods. Authority in the group is therefore built at multiple levels—it results from the bottom-up dynamic of interaction between members, but also from the charismatic position of the founder—the woman and leader at the helm of Captivating. At the same time, these grassroots processes of building authority and the aforementioned lack of clerical control in the online community do not mean rejection of the Church's authority as an institution (cf. Kołodziejska and Arat 2017). This is present in references to Church documents and the teaching of the pope and Polish bishops. In its bottom-up nature and significant autonomy generated by a digital environment, however, Captivating aims to remain a community functioning within the framework of the Roman Catholic Church.

OFFLINE CONSTRAINTS: NAVIGATING WITHIN THE LOCAL STRUCTURES OF THE CHURCH

A Captivating conference in the city of Łódź in March 2019 was attended by more than 900 women. Its motto was “Open yourself to change. Be a strong Catholic woman!” Speeches by the community founder and invited guests called upon attendees to make that change, understood diversely: as deepening their religiosity, as initiating changes in social life, but also as a transformation motivated by the women's personal needs. The conference aimed to deliver a clear message to participants: “Nothing will change if you don’t change something,” as the group founder said.

Some of the women engaged in the community also take this call to change, which recurs in various contexts in the Captivating discourse, to mean an invitation to act in the space of the local Church. In the research period, local Captivating groups were operating in more than 30 places throughout Poland, mainly based on grassroots mobilization. The message sent to the community's members was the following: if you want a Captivating group to operate in your town, you have to do it yourself.

For many group leaders, this was their first such experience in their lives, and forced them to overcome their fears and ideas about women's leadership (leading as something unfeminine). They were helped to adapt to their new role by interpreting their own, agentic actions in religious terms as being led by God or guided by the Holy Spirit. Religious legitimations for women's leadership were also provided by the community; for example during a training course, when the nun leading it presented leadership styles referring to the Virgin Mary as a leader. These religious legitimations enabled the women involved in the Captivating communities to make changes and enter new roles, while also giving them a sense of continuity in their religious identities and affiliations.

To understand the agentic potential of the actions undertaken by local female leaders, it is necessary to place them in the context mentioned in the first part of the article. The activity of lay people in the Roman Catholic Church in Poland is still marginalized, and it is mostly the local parish priest who decides on events at parish level. Women's activity in parishes usually focuses on charity and prayer activities and the organization of celebrations, and in smaller localities also on cleaning work (Szwed 2015). The Captivating community, meanwhile, is a grassroots women's initiative aimed at and run by women. This often constitutes a challenge for local priests, as it forces them to revise their ideas of what women's activity should look like and to acknowledge that it need not have a specific objective—auxiliary or related to prayer—but might rather simply serve the interested parties.

Although, as mentioned above, Captivating is to a great extent a self-governing community, its organizers also strive to function within the structures of the Roman Catholic Church. For most of the women involved, this connection is very important, and the presence of the priest, who celebrates the Eucharist, is essential. Local groups also need a physical space for their meetings. As a result, the stance of local—especially parish—priests, determines the group's comfort. The interviews I conducted with leaders showed that the story of specific local groups varied. Some of them, often through private contacts and affections, had managed to find a regular priest to support their group. These clergies differed in the level of their involvement—from standard celebration of Mass, via preparing sermon contents dedicated to women, to participation in group meetings, leading retreats, etc. But in some cases, groups have been unable to find a regular priest or have encountered overt resistance from priests and other believers as a result of their formation or operation. A local priest refused to support one group, arguing that their activity would entice women away from other communities that he organized in the parish. In another place, the leader announced her intention to organize a local group in her parish and received a generally positive reception. Yet the parish priests suggested that she should strengthen her motivation and come back to him in a year. This example can be interpreted as an attempt to question women's ideas, based on the stereotypical thinking mentioned above about women's engagement being superficial and fickle.

In two other groups, priests declined to support the group, saying that they did not know enough about women's issues. The local leader interpreted this refusal as the priests' fear of preaching to women, especially demanding listeners with formation experience. Some leaders noted that particularly in the initial phase of setting up local groups, when Captivating was not yet recognized, priests expected them to provide recommendations and telephone calls from other clergy leading analogous groups. These experiences of challenging women's motivation to act and ignoring their needs if they do not have clerical support no doubt contribute to the leaders' rather critical—especially in the context of the community's conservative nature—opinions on the Church's attitude to women. One finding of the survey I carried out among the people leading local groups was that most of them think the Church should pay more heed to women's needs and expectations and does not do enough to harness women's potential.

The groups had various ways of circumventing the local restrictions, and sometimes also overt resistance from priests. In one group, the parish priest tried to join Captivating together with another women's group he led. The leaders did not agree to this, however, which forced them to seek pastoral support elsewhere. Ultimately, they received this from a priest in another parish, but owing to local inter-church relations he did not formally have a supervisory role. Furthermore, this was not the only case of such unofficial support of Captivating from supportive priests.

The Captivating community has also developed a more general strategy—which was not effective in all cases—for preventing or avoiding resistance from diocese priests. The local leaders were encouraged at the group formation stage to inform the local bishop or diocesan women's pastor in person. This top-down legitimation of the group's activity generally helped with negotiations at parish level, as well as convincing group leaders that they were acting legally, in accordance with the specified rules. In one group, however, the Captivating women encountered an unfavorable reception at diocesan level. The group's leader explains her strategic action towards the bishop's ignorance of the initiative as follows:

I was there, I went. I presented everything. I went to see the women’s pastor, he agreed. I did everything I was supposed to. In fact I didn’t break [any rules]. I could have gone to [name of the order], not gone to the bishop at all. So I did everything I was supposed to. But the trick was to look in monastic orders, because I knew they didn’t come under the bishop’s jurisdiction. [Luiza]

This quotation shows two types of behavior symptomatic of the community: on the one hand, the aforementioned tendency to follow the rules and respect the Church hierarchy; on the other, alternative, strategic actions engaging friars who are at least partly independent of this hierarchy, and who in many locations support Captivating.

Acknowledging the authority of the Church hierarchy and being recognized by it also has one more function for Captivating—legitimizing the community as Catholic. This is particularly important as the community challenges women's conventional ways of acting in the Church in Poland. Captivating's members and leaders are all women, with priests only playing an accompanying role. Moreover, the community's format is unusual for Poland, combining online and offline activities, and not constituting a formation group in the strict sense of the word. All these elements may provide grounds for questioning the legitimacy of the community's operation within the Roman Catholic Church. For this reason, various types of mechanisms confirming the group's Catholicism were periodically employed. During the research period, the leaders liked to emphasize that Captivating was acting with the approval of the women's pastor of the Polish Episcopal Conference³ and that representatives had participated in and presented women's point of view at Women's Ministry Council meetings. The Captivating community also legitimizes itself as Catholic with the help of its patrons—Saint Gianna Beretta Molla and Mary, mother of Jesus, to whom the group was entrusted in a ceremonial act, as well as by emphasizing that it bases its activity on Roman Catholic teaching.

As I have tried to show, although Captivating challenges local (parish or diocesan), frequently informal rules on how and where women can act in the Church, at the same time the group does not disavow the doctrinal rules and hierarchical structures of the Roman Catholic Church. Their actions are more about navigating within these structures than resisting them.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The example of Captivating shows the importance of the proposal to combine the online and offline made by scholars of media studies and religion (Campbell 2012; Campbell and Garner 2016; Lövheim and Campbell 2017). The connections between these two contexts may be manifested at the level of an individual's religious practices and engagement as well as in the collective dimension. Moreover, multisite reality (Campbell and Garner 2016) might be not only a result of practices, but also an intentional format of the community, which, like Captivating, fundamentally operates at the intersection between online and offline. The relationship between these two spheres is also certainly shaped by the context. Captivating accentuates its attachment to the institutional dimension of Catholicism, which places key religious practices (e.g., the Eucharist or confession) in the offline sphere, as well as making men the sole ministers of these sacraments.⁴ Not everything, therefore, can be fully mediatized and realized in an exclusively women's community. Moreover, as I noted earlier, embodiment of practices, such as a physical meeting in the parish, may simply be subjectively important for the individuals involved.

In the case of Captivating, there are tensions between the practices in the digital environment and those in the local reality of the Roman Catholic Church. In the online sphere, Captivating's activity is characterized by considerable autonomy, meaning not just independence from direct clerical control, but also the opportunity to have an influence on what community, practices, and consequently also religion mean. Because of the “openness” of the digital environment, Captivating is constructed as a community “free from criticism,” of supportive women connected by their values, rather than their physical location, combining religious activities creatively with ideas of personal development and wellbeing, and also reflecting the everyday contexts in which the women live (e.g., combining family, professional and religious roles). In the online sphere, it is women who become experts for each other on religious issues, although these are not necessarily strictly dogmatic ones, but rather concern appropriate practices. Authority is generated in conversation and participation—joint discussions, testimonies, or, as in the case of the charismatic founder of the group, sharing her daily, private life. The community is a place where women negotiate what it means to be a Catholic, as well as a source of the narratives used in individual construction of religious identity. The digital environment in Captivating is therefore a space in which women's agency is enacted, but also where they build a sense of empowerment based on reflexivity of the actions taken in the community.

In the offline space, meanwhile, the members of Captivating experience limitations resulting, firstly, from relations with priests, and secondly, from the operation of certain informal rules about how religious women should act. In the Polish context, the shift to offline inevitably confronts the community with clerical control, be it in the form of friendly care or of the acts of resistance or ignorance I have described. In relations with local priests, as well as other participants in local religious life, beliefs are manifested that are restrictive for women, such as the expectation that they should concentrate on working for others or prayer, rather than attending to their own needs; and that they should do this within existing structures and not build new ones. This shows how significant context is for both online and offline activity, in this case associated with the specific nature of Roman Catholicism in Poland.

Although the women of Captivating are relatively independent in the online space and encounter structural restrictions in the local space, it would be simplistic to suggest such a binary contrast between autonomy and control. While operating relatively independently in the online sphere, Captivating also declares its attachment to the Roman Catholic Church. The community's aims are inspired by what happens offline, such as the Church's teaching on women. Captivating does not challenge the institution's authority, and regards the official rules as binding. The idea of subordination of one's actions to the will of God and being led by the Holy Spirit or Mary are also factors in the notion of women's autonomy. In the subjective dimension, it is not autonomy, but surrendering to God that is the condition of personal agency for these women. Last but not least, in the digital environment, means of informal control are activated in the form of criticism from observers about group leaders, accusations that the community is not Catholic or inauthentic, etc.

The online autonomy is therefore not total, just as such structural limitations in the offline sphere are not. Captivating's networked nature, taking place both online and offline, is a resource that allows the community to negotiate its place at the level of the diocese and parish. The belief, generated discursively in the online space, that Captivating is a Catholic initiative supported (at the time) by the Polish Bishop's Conference legitimizes the women's activity at the local level. The digital environment also serves as a source of inspiration for local leaders, while technologies create a flow of knowhow concerning how to work together with priests, how to cope in crisis situations, and how to navigate effectively in local structures.

Hybrid forms of community like Captivating, functioning both in the digital space and the physical ones of local churches or parishes, create semi-autonomous spaces of women's activity. The reasons for the incomplete autonomy are structural pressures experienced in the offline reality, but also the influence of the broader institutional context on what happens in the online space. Yet these conditions do not exclude the possibility of acting with agency resulting in change. As Captivating shows, however, this may occur in dynamic tension between creativity and reproduction of the institutional model, and between subordination to the rules and their strategic use or reinterpretation.

This research contributes to the emerging discussion about digital media and women in conservative religions. As I have noted, digital communities are usually regarded in the subject literature as autonomous spaces that permit women various forms of resistance to conservative religious institutions (cf. Lövheim 2016). As wider research on women and religion shows, however, agency may also be enacted in submitting to institutional rules (Avishai 2008; Mahmood 2005). A similar, broad perspective on this phenomenon is therefore also needed for analysis of women's online activity. This is particularly true as agency here may also result from the very formula of the practices (e.g., participation in a grassroots digital community in which transformations of authority take place as a result of personal engagement, conversations, etc.), rather than the contents of practices (e.g., open questioning of the religious institution's rules).

When analyzing various types of networked communities (Campbell and Garner 2016), it is essential to consider the connections between the online and offline dimensions (Lövheim and Campbell 2017). We must also enquire not only about the autonomy that digital media offer women, but also the structural pressures they experience in the offline sphere, which reciprocally influence the hybrid forms of their religious activity. At the same time, the relations between online and offline cannot be perceived unidirectionally. The deficits and restrictions that women experience from conservative religious institutions, as well as more generally in local offline settings, might of course be a factor pushing them towards increasingly strong online engagement. Yet activity in the online sphere can also generate capital in the shape of contacts acquired, models to follow, or a sense of empowerment that can become a resource in women's individual or group activities in the offline religious sphere. The opportunity for and direction of change will, of course, be an outcome of the engagement and agency of actors in conjunction with the structural limitations existing in a given context. Lastly, one can imagine another model in which the online and offline dimensions are seen as parallel and separate, rather than intersecting. Online activity in this context would play a “safety valve” role for religious women, allowing them to maintain the continuity of religious engagement in the conservative offline context without the need or opportunity to change it. Of course, the hypothetical scenarios referring to religious multisite reality highlighted above would require wider consideration and empirical verification in the field of research on women and networked religion.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editor of the journal and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and very useful comments and suggestions. I also thank Katarzyna Zielińska for discussions and feedback on earlier versions of the text and for continuous support that I get from her.

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).

Footnotes

References