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Polish Priest Measures Parishioners' Piety With Fingerprint Scanner

by Caleb Johnson on February 1, 2010 at 05:50 PM

Aside from the Good Lord, parishioners at a Catholic church in Poland will soon have another seemingly omnipresent being making sure they attend mass: technology. According to Reuters, father Grzegorz Sowa recently installed in his church an electronic fingerprint scanner that keeps track of how often schoolchildren attend mass. If a student attends mass 200 times over a three-year period, he or she doesn't have to pass an exam before confirmation.

Formerly, the kids would have to get the priest to sign a sheet of paper that said they'd been present at mass. Now, they'll simply press their finger to a screen and be on their way, saving both priest and parishioner time. "This is comfortable. We don't have to stand in a line to get the priest's signature [confirming our presence at the mass] in our confirmation notebooks," said a student named Karolina.

While the Catholic Church still hasn't totally embraced technology, recent years have seen it become a little more open. Pope Benedict XVI even said he's cool with Facebook and MySpace, sorta. Hey, it's all about baby steps -- tiny, tiny baby steps. After all, Rome wasn't built in a day, and, for that matter, neither was the Vatican. [From: Reuters]

Tags: catholic, church, fingerprint, fingerprintscanner, priest, privacy, religion, top

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