The plagiarising Polish priest prison palaver.

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 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. Przyczyna, a sermon expert at Krakow's Pontifical Academy of Theology, added that 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 and will rely on sharp-eared parishioners to compare online texts with those in Biblioteka Kaznodziejska, a monthly magazine that publishes sermons which have been delivered from the pulpit in Poland.

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 there you have it. The Polish church will be clamping down hard on plagiarism among their clergy. I presume a prison sentence will only be applied if the priest also uses litotes while genuflecting with a rubric. Luckily for me they have not set out the sentence for awful acts against alliteration....