Typy legitymizacji w wypowiedziach hierarchów Kościoła rzymskokatolickiego w Polsce na temat gender i praw reprodukcyjnych

The article discusses the problem of legitimations in the discourse of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland on gender and reproductive rights from 2012–2017. Its aim is to reconstruct the ways the representatives of the Church legitimize their standpoint within these discursive fields and to explain the role of using diverse religious and secular legitimations for the public presence of the Roman Catholic Church. The results of the quantitative content analysis of the Polish Bishops’ Conference documents and bishops’ public utterances, i.e. media interviews, sermons, and conference speeches, are presented in the article. At the theoretical and methodological level the article uses the social construction of reality perspective (Berger and Luckmann), the conception of discursive construction of legitimation (van Leeuwen) and the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD).