When it’s not regular kids, priests will mess with the brainchildren of other priests
Christ, but what is it with those damn priests?
First, they can’t keep their hands off our children, and now they’re stealing other priests’ sermons from the Internet. Okay, I suppose that is slightly better than trolling the Web for paedophile porn sites but as a type of behaviour it’s still not exactly in the ‘What would Jesus have done?’ category:
Poland’s 28,000 Roman Catholic priests have been told by church authorities that they may be fined if they are discovered to have plagiarised 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 Plagiarise or not to Plagiarise, told Polish media that the guide had been written to address what had become an increasingly common problem, as more churches put their sermons online and an increasing numbers of priests used the internet.
The 150-page Polish guide is being sold to priests in for £6. But Przyczyna has already faced a backlash to his anti-plagiarism crusade. He told the online Catholic News Service that he had received complaints for “harassing priests and exposing their weaknesses”.
Well, yes, we all know only too well that the church doesn’t like it when the ‘weaknesses’ of its priests are exposed.
That can, after all, cost the church a Hell of a lot of money in reparations and out of court settlements.
Anyway, it’s nice to see that many within the church still believe in those old Omerta virtues - and while plagiarism might not be as serious and ultimately as costly as raping children, it is quite remarkable that so many still automatically defend any kind of criminal activity by the clergy and brand those who object to these crimes as people who harass priests.
It truly is as Ecclesiastes 1:9 says:
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
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April 27th, 2008 at 16:27
Catholics plagiarizing, well that’s new. NOT! Most of Christianity is borrowed without either copyright notice or original religion citations…
… imagine all those pagan holidays used without permission for the sole purpose of duping believers.
April 27th, 2008 at 16:42
Thanks for the comment.
Yes, fair enough point. Mind you, the whole rising-God thing has been done in about all the religions that were (once) linked to the changing of the seasons. You have that whole Mithras thing (from which the Christians supposedly took over quite a lot of elements.) The Egyptians had their Osiris; the Greek had Persephone & Demeter - and so forth, und so weiter.
Nothing new under the sun indeed.
(So a bit of sermon nabbing is truly not a very big deal in the wonderful world of organised religion.)
J.