Sometimes you wonder if technology is always a good thing. And yes, I just said that. It seems that the parish priest in the small Polish town of Gryfow Slaski (and no, I haven’t a clue as to how to pronounce that) has installed a fingerprint scanner to check the attendance of the young people at his church. Convenient? Yes. Creepy? Possibly.

It’s maybe not as bad as it seems at first blush given that the kids must attend 200 masses in order to avoid taking a big exam prior to confirmation. But that only brings up more questions for me. Why does 200 masses get you out of an exam? I’ve seen kids at Catholic church. I used to be a kid in a Catholic church. There’s nothing I learned at those hundreds of masses that would have helped me pass an exam on much of anything other than the list of edible things that communion didn’t taste like.

And what if this Catholic tech thing catches on? Are we approaching a day when you won’t need to even bother going to confession because the priests will simply scan your Twitter feeds and blog posts and email you your penance? How long will it be until you can tithe via PayPal?

Ahhhh, the sweet smell of progress.