from:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...italy_priest_dc
Saintly Italian Beauty Pageant Is Thanks to God
ROME (Reuters) - Praise the Lord for sexy girls! An Italian priest on Sunday prepared to celebrate his parish's patron saint by presiding over a beauty pageant to choose the town's candidate for the upcoming Miss Italy competition, Italian news agency ANSA reported.
"If you look at the girls in an innocent way it's not a sin but a way of thanking the Lord," Carlo Crucianelli, a priest in the central Italian town of Civita Castellana, told ANSA.
"Beauty is never embarrassing for it is a gift from the Lord."
The beauty queens of the parish will take to the catwalk on Sunday evening on a piazza in front of the parish church of San Luigi Gonzaga.
Crucianelli is the first known Italian priest to head a beauty pageant jury, although a Capuchin monk played the same unusual role in the southern town of Cropani in 1997.