Religion: Beauty & the Archbishop

To celebrate the opening of the new Ernie Pyle Bathing Beach in Albuquerque, N. Mex. last week, promoters scheduled a bathing-beauty contest. A large field of entrants got their bathing suits and best smiles ready. The winner was to be crowned “Miss Duke City.”*

The news of these preparations reached to Santa Fe. There, Roman Catholic Archbishop Edwin V. Byrne sat himself down and wrote a pastoral letter that was read in Albuquerque’s Catholic churches last week. Wrote the archbishop: “Such beauty contests are an appeal to the baser instincts … As the archbishop of the Catholics in this area, I forbid any Catholic to participate or help in any way in said beauty competition, and I entreat parents to prohibit their daughters from doing so.”

Next day the beauty contest was quietly called off.

* The city is named for an 15th century Spanish Duke of Alburquerque.