RIDICULOUS SOVEREIGNTY FOR SINGLE DAY

Stratford Evening Post, Volume I, Issue 79, 12 March 1931, Page 5

RIDICULOUS SOVEREIGNTY FOR SINGLE DAY

PROMOTERS SCATHINGLY DENOUNCED BY PAPER

WORLD GONE MAD TERRIBLE FATE OF OTHER WINNERS CAMPAIGN AGAINST IMMORALITY Press Association. —Copyright. (Reed. 10.10 a.m.) ROME, March 11. As a sequel to an advertisement in a local paper for girls to participate in a beauty queen competition in the Riviera, the Vatican organ, “Osservatore Romano,” continuing its campaign against immorality, vigorously denounces such “pagan” contests, “in which young girls exchange their purity and chastity for evanescent and ridiculous sovereignty for a single day.” “Murder, suicide, hunger and death have been the fate of girls successful in such contests in various parts of the world,” continues the paper, “but the world has gone mad to such an extent that not even their terrible end has influenced their emulators or the advertisers of contests. Even sacrilege is perpetrated in fanatical descriptions of these events, for newspapers sometimes compare the participants to fourteenth century Madonnas.”