Seems sinister for a church to insist on fingerprinting children

I saw this at HumanistLife today – a church in Poland is using a fingerprint scanner to make sure kids are attending mass.

The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.

The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.

“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 one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.

What a weird idea. And parents agreed to this because…? I wonder how secure the system is. I wonder how much information the priest will be keeping on these kids beyond the prints. This just seems like something that could be abused in some way.

Thoughts?