Well, I guess we all kind of saw this one coming. Just days after the news came out that an Italian priest was organizing a beauty pageant for nuns, apparently his superiors have already shut it down before it could even get off the ground.

“My superiors were not happy. The local bishop was not happy, but they did not understand me either,” Father Rungi told Reuters news agency from the town of Mondragone, near Naples.

“It was interpreted as more of a physical thing,” he said. “Now, no one is saying that nuns can’t be beautiful, but I was thinking about something more complete.”

“Nuns are - above all - women, and beauty is a gift from God,” he told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper before he cancelled the project.

By putting an end to Father Rungi’s pageant, it would seem to me that the church establishment has not only managed to sabotage a perfectly suitable opportunity to improve and modernize their image (and the image of the nuns) among the young and disenfranchised, but also reinforced their own “old and dour” perception at the same time. Well done, stiffly stiffersons.

As usual, the nuns who came up with the idea in the first place will just have to wait until the culture changes. It does change, right?

Source: BBC.