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Although in late-modern societies the idea of a 'forever' relationship has lost its dominant status, it is consistently upheld by the Roman Catholic Church. The aim of the article is to analyse the practices of sustaining the durability of Catholic marriage, which we treat as ways of adapting to the tensions between late-modern models of intimacy and the rule of indissolubility of marriage. We refer to data collected in qualitative research among educated Roman Catholic women in Poland. Using the lived religion approach, we demonstrate how these women sacralise actions within marriage that have been secularised in the late-modern world, while also using late modernity as a reservoir of meanings, leading to hybridisation of religious practices. We argue that sustaining conservative religious rules is often based on actions in which religious aspects are negotiated and transformed. Religion operates 'non-autonomously' in these processes, entering a relationship with elements that are originally not religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is based on empirical research on humanist (individualized and mostly secular) weddings conducted in Poland between the years 2016 and 2020. As an emerging new form of civic rituality, humanist marriage ceremonies affect the ritual landscape of Poland, and by doing so they change the status quo. One can perceive their appearance as a sign of secularization and detachment from the institutionalized religion of the dominant Catholic Church, but also other religious transformations encompassed by the term of re-enchantment, such as the emergence of less formalized, alternative spiritualities, and changes in the field of institutionalized religion, namely its privatization. In my analysis, I go beyond such binaries as religious/secular, sacred/profane, sacred/secular and demonstrate that humanist wedding ceremonies deploy four different kinds of the sacred (the character of these categories is analytical rather than substantial): religious-sacred; nonreligious-sacred; spiritual-sacred and secular-sacred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]