As a kid I remember happily watching the various Miss World or Miss Universe pageants. Whether I was being dazzled by the well choreographed song and dance routines, or being enlightened by way the ladies thought world peace was important, it was always quite a good way to spend a couple of hours. I never did find out why they had two different pageants. Does Miss Universe trump Miss World as the title seems to suggest? And why does achieving world peace centre on building an athletics stadium for children??

I started reminiscing about these pageants after reading this on the NZ Catholic website (a cracking good read, and at least the website doesn’t go AWOL for a couple of weeks…).  It sounds like a bit of a crackpot idea that started out with some merit but then got rapidly out of hand. And at least it looks like they have enough nuns between 18 and 40 to even contemplate something like this. I’d imagine if this was proposed in NZ we’d need to slide the age group out a little… Now I’m not saying there are no young nuns in NZ, it’s just that I don’t see many of them around. Maybe they’re cloistered away somewhere.

I’m sure the root causes of the drop off in vocations to the convents is a symptom of the rampant feminism of our times, or maybe it’s the unchecked material world we live in now that makes a vocation to religious life so hard, or maybe it’s the Catholic Church in NZ doing a poor job promoting vocations. I blame Helen Clark because its election year and no one’s really mentioned her on the blog this week.