Promoting Transparency in Religious Denominations

Transparency is one of the main challen-ges faced by religious groups, since they must explain their mission and the use of the resources required to carry it out, while subject to rules and regulations that do not take their distinctive nature into account. The wide-ranging autonomy in orga-nizational terms recognized under the law cannot be used as an argument to avoid compliance with legal obligations in relation to transparency, although it may well be invoked to adapt or make compliance with certain specific requirements more flexible. The purpose of this study is to present transparency as a positive tool that enables religious denominations to explain their mission, spread their message, publicize the range of activi-ties they undertake, and show how the financial di-mension is a merely instrumental aspect of the exercise of their mission.