Beauty, Right & Wrong

The Roman Catholic Church considered feminine beauty last week. One of its views was sympathetic, the other sarcastic.

A Hungarian plastic surgeon, troubled by the fact that many confessors tell their female penitents that face lifting and similar plastic surgery is wrong, appealed to Jesuit Father Virginio Rotondi for a ruling. Rotondi, a priest reputed to enjoy the Pope's special confidence (he divulged the Pope's vision of Christ two years ago), replied that plastic surgery is good or evil, or neither, according to the purpose for which it is performed. The surgeon himself is usually justified. His unobjectionable purpose is to earn a living and remedy ugliness. And the patient--unless his motive is actually evil, like that of a criminal trying to alter his features to escape the law--is usually moved by motives that are indifferent or actually good. It is not wicked to want to improve one's looks, suggested Rotondi. "It does not seem to me exaggerated to say that sometimes plastic surgery has brought back peace to estranged married couples . . . When confessors tell their penitents that face lifting is a frivolity and is condemned without reserve by the Church, they are . . . wrong."

Attempting to lend more dignity to beauty contests--an institution which the church has consistently opposed--the promoters of the Miss Italy contest at Rimini decided to put all entrants through a culture quiz. The results were disastrous. The beauties could not identify Hamlet, Lucrezia Borgia, or even Romulus and Remus (said one: "Greek twins''). None knew the boiling point of water, which in Italy is a simple 100DEGC. One was unable to name a single Italian wine--her brave try: "Champagne." Without congratulating the winner, Nives Zegna, 19, of Milan, the Vatican's eminent Osservatore Romano editorialized: "The attempt to ennoble the beauty contest, to demonstrate that these feminine fairs are different from horse shows by virtue of God's gift of intelligence, was shipwrecked on the beach at Rimini."

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