{"id":72,"date":"2008-08-25T18:48:33","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T18:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/a-nuns-story-yes-a-beauty-page.html"},"modified":"2008-08-25T18:48:33","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T18:48:33","slug":"a-nuns-story-yes-a-beauty-page","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/a-nuns-story-yes-a-beauty-page.html","title":{"rendered":"Check out this “Nun’s Story” A beauty pageant for women religious…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sister<\/span>According to The Times of London<\/a><\/em>, yes, indeed, an Italian priest (where else?) is holding an online beauty contest to find the best-looking nun.<\/p>\n

Father Antonio Rungi, of Mondragone, near Naples, said he expected at least 1,000 nuns to enter the Sister Italia contest. It would run online at first, but he hoped that it would become a “real pageant” along the lines of the annual Miss Italy contest.
\nFather Rungi, a moral theologian with his own blog, said that the nuns would not wear swimsuits or revealing outfits. What he valued most in a woman was “inner beauty”. Asked for his feminine ideal, he replied: “Well, I would say Sophia Loren.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

La Ciociara doesn’t do too badly on the outer beauty, either. In any case…<\/p>\n

The contestants must be aged between 18 and 40, and can be either full members of an order or novices. Father Rungi said that he expected many who applied to be young, attractive — and non-Italian. He said: “Do you really think nuns are all wizened, funereal old ladies? Today it’s not like that any more, thanks to an injection of youth and vitality brought to our country by foreign girls.” He said there were nuns from Africa and Latin America who were “really very, very pretty. The Brazilian girls above all.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Mother<\/span> Okay, all in good fun, I suppose. Still…At best, beauty contests are one of the more absurd competitions–leaving aside a few of the recent Olympic events. And while nuns need not be someone’s stereotype of an old crone, how would Mother Teresa fare? On the other hand, no reason nuns shouldn’t be babes–be a fine example to the word. Check out Sophia herself in “White Sister” and of course Audrey Hepburn in “A Nun’s Story.”
\n\"Hepburn.jpg\"<\/span>Then again, you know what happened at the end of that film…Calling poor Saint Clare<\/a>–legendary for her beauty–help me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to The Times of London, yes, indeed, an Italian priest (where else?) is holding an online beauty contest to find the best-looking nun. Father Antonio Rungi, of Mondragone, near Naples, said he expected at least 1,000 nuns to enter the Sister Italia contest. It would run online at first, but he hoped that it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nCheck out this "Nun's Story" A beauty pageant for women religious... - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/a-nuns-story-yes-a-beauty-page.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Check out this "Nun's Story" A beauty pageant for women religious... - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"According to The Times of London, yes, indeed, an Italian priest (where else?) is holding an online beauty contest to find the best-looking nun. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}