Welcome to a browse of

an eyebrow-raising study

exploring financial accountability & transparency today
on 1000+ UK Catholic parish & diocesan websites

This website is a short and makeshift version of the unusual OpenBooks Project - an alternative to the 3-part PDF report.

All the key information is here - purposes, sources, findings, suggestions, taking points - and much of the quotations from dioceses, parishes, charity regulators, bloggers, the media.

It's in sections that aim to make it easy read for stakeholders in Catholic church finances - offerers, clergy, Trustees, HMRC.  It's about what seems to be something of a blind spot on an important right carefully created for the 1983 Code of Canon Law.  Canon 1287.2 is about dioceses define that duty, and a drift away. The aim now is to raise awarness and appreciation....

 So the Project brings together, compares and contrasts finds from many different sources - nearly all on the websites so that anyone can check the data.

The Project does raise some questions. The Porject is avauabke as a three-part report, and key information is on this website.and introducing such questions as:
is Webful Blindness a new variant of Wilful Blindness? Cliqueralism and Historicalism of Clericalism? Who's accountable for what's on parish websites? And though the Church may be universal, are some parts more universal than others?

HRH Gibbons, Author and Expostulator of OpenBooks

Of special interest may be....

Some forward-thinking suggestions
that UK bishops may appreciate

such as updating their 1983 Canon 1287.2 obligations
to all those 'offerers of goods' to parishes today

and maybe letting'em say Yea or Nay to changes

Is OpenBooks in academic or ecclestiastical language and style? 
Not really. One model is the first Catholic President of the USA, whose office around 1962 - maybe an input to Vatican II - was said to have this note: “My own old-fashioned belief is that every Presidential message should be a model of grace, lucidity and taste in expression.  At the very least, each message should be in English, clear and trenchant in its style, logical in its structure, and devoid of gobbledygook”.

Is everything in the Project on-line - for anyone to check?  
Not quite.  There are a few references to publications such as this letter by Fr Michael Garnett, Cajamarca, Peru, Letter in The Tablet 6 July 2019. “The old bishop under whom I worked for twenty years and who was both a civil and a canon lawyer said Law, especially Canon Law, doesn’t work at over 2000 metres above sea level.’"  (NB At 1474 metres, Ben Nevis is the highest point of the UK.)

Some you can find on-line. And Anglican parish priest Fr Alec Mitchell provided this letter in The Guardian on 6 December 2017  introducing Cliqueralism. "A former colleague’s wife, who, on arrival at her husband’s new parish church, deigned to move a flower-stand from its accustomed place. The woman “in charge of flowers” came straight over and punched her!"

There are also five personal emails cited from senior members of the Church, managing to  They include "I cannot begin to fathom why anyone would want to write an article about Canon 1287.2"