Assessment of the transparency of the functioning of the Church Fund in Poland in terms of granting it

Abstract

This paper attempts to assess the transparency of the Church Fund’s operations in the area of awarding grants for the maintenance and renovation of historic sacred buildings and for supporting socially useful ecclesiastical activities. For this purpose, the author has outlined the procedure for awarding grants from the Church Fund by the Minister of the Interior and Administration. The author has also presented the practice of secretly increasing the budget of the Church Fund during the financial year, as observed in recent years, and the problem of not publishing decisions on awarding grants insofar as they concerned the distribution of funds from the said increase in the Fund’s budget. Basic measures have been proposed to potentially contribute to increasing the transparency of the granting procedure and to build citizens’ trust in the State. The area related to the financing of the Church Fund should be considered as non-transparent. On the other hand, the transparency of the grant award procedure is given credit for it is transparent, albeit apparently quite complicated, and is communicated to applicants in a comprehensible manner. When presenting the said procedure and assessing the functioning of the Church Fund in this respect, the author analyses and interprets the current provisions of the constitutional, statutory and sub-statutory rank laws in force applicable to the subject matter. Incidentally, elements of the historical overview of applicable laws are also used.

Keywords

• grants
• public funds
• Church Fund
• transparency