Poland’s 28,000 Roman Catholic priests have been told by church authorities that they may be fined if they are discovered to have plagiarized their sermons from the Internet, and could even face up to three years in prison.
The Church has published a self-help book on writing sermons to lure parish priests away from the growing habit of stealing the words of their fellow clergy.
Father Wieslaw Przyczyna, the co-author of To Plagiarize or Not to Plagiarize, said the guide had been written to address what had become an increasingly common problem as more churches put their sermons online.
Przyczyna, a sermon expert at Krakow’s Pontifical Academy of Theology, said the book’s aim was to shame culprits and prompt them to confess what they had done.
“Unfortunately the practice has become more usual than not,” he said. “But if a priest takes another priest’s words and presents them as his own without saying where he got them from, this is unethical and against the rules of authorship.”
The Church authorities have said they will start to carry out systematic checks in an attempt to clamp down on the practice.
Church heads are also discussing the possibility of teaching trainee priests about the concept of intellectual property.
The main culprits are said not to be older priests, who often do not have access to the Internet, but their more youthful counterparts. Young priests turn to the Web when they are less than proficient at public speaking, and particularly on a Saturday night when they are panicking about having nothing to say at mass the following morning, Przyczyna said.
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