MUST ALL AGREE WITH THE POPE?

Dear Editor:

I wonder if the Pope knows how he makes people laugh at him by getting so het up about nudity! His Holiness is supposed to be in the particular confidence of God, but he seems to have found out that God made a mistake when He made people without any clothes. Dr. Potter, of New York, not so very long ago pointed out that the first Pope was a nudist, for Peter went fishing without any clothes and had to cast his fisher's cloack about him when he wanted to go to Jesus. The early Christians in the Catholic Church, men and women, used to be baptized in one another's presence quite without clothing, certainly good nudist practice. But what can you expect of a seventy-eight-year-old gentleman who has probably been bundled up in clothes ever since he entered the boys' seminary? To be sure, he was a mighty mountain climber and must have used his legs then. But if a man is so dreadfully afraid of his physical feelings that when a woman coms into his presence she must be covered from her neck to her feet, how can you expect him to have a normal idea about the innocence of the body? Under these circumstances we can understand how the dear old gentleman thinks bodies are tremendously important. The pity of it is that he seems to want to impose his curious morbid view on everybody else. Lucky it isn't five or six hundred years ago, when he would have succeeded.

                        Yours for some good, healthy religion.

J.H.L.

Washington Heights, New York

(Source: The Nudist, Vol. IV, No. 5, May, 1935)