| Cathleen Falsani

Was she too sexy for her church?

Warning: Cleavage may be dangerous to your soul.

At least in Italy.

A Roman Catholic bishop in the Italian city of Fano, on the Adriatic, recently fired Caterina Bonci, a 38-year-old woman who had taught religion classes in state-run schools on behalf of the diocese for 14 years.

Bishop Vittorio Tomassetti says Bonci lost her job because she is divorced, which goes against Catholic Church teaching.

Bonci, who the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera describes as a “leggy, long-haired blond,” says she was sacked because she’s just too sexy for the church.

Her firing caused a media fire storm in Italy and has raised a few eyebrows around the world, including my own.

Bonci, who was separated from her husband in 1995 and divorced in 2000, insists she never kept her marital status a secret and that it was her appearance and her fashionable wardrobe that eventually led to her unemployment.

“I have always been attacked by my female colleagues and by the rest of the staff because of my attractiveness,” Bonci is quoted as saying in an article posted on the Internet news site World Net Daily. “And if you consider that at our parent-teacher meetings, it was always the fathers who came to see me, one can see why I have so often been at the center of attention and a target of gossip.”

The principal of her school is quoted as saying some parents and teachers complained about the way she dressed. He claims Bonci, who on the blond bombshell spectrum lands somewhere between Tara Reid and Victoria Gotti, dressed, would show up to school in miniskirts.

Bonci told the Reuters news agency that she didn’t care if fathers accompanied their children to her religion classes just to gawk at her as long as the kids came to class where they learned about God.

She denies wearing miniskirts or provocative outfits to work and defended her right to wear what she likes in her off hours, telling World Net Daily, “I am not a nun.”

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Bonci is right, and she was fired for being too sexy and not because she’s a divorcee. (The bishop would be well within his rights to bar her from teaching religion on behalf of the church because she is divorced or for any number of other violations of church teaching, according to my sources on church law.)

But if it was her ample decolletage and high hemlines that got Bonci in trouble — on or off the clock — I have to question the quality of the theology behind it.

Bonci is right: She’s not a nun. She isn’t required to wear a veil. (Heck, most nuns today aren’t required to wear a veil, wimple or long habit.) She shouldn’t have to don a burqa to teach children about God.

Now, nobody wants their kids to learn the Ten Commandments from someone who looks like she should be swinging from a stripper’s pole, and there is (arguably) a time and a place for a tube top, and it’s not at mass. (That’s just bad taste, honey.) But it doesn’t sound like that’s what was going on in Fano.

Bonci is the hot, single mom in a small and, it would seem, small-minded town.

It appears she is viewed as a threat, as an occasion for sin, because of the way she looks. And she has been punished for it.

Where, then, is the culpability on the part of those whose wanton gazes fall upon her womanly assets? Jesus once told a group of fellas that to look at a woman with lust in their heart was the same as taking her to bed.

I don’t think he was implying that the woman was the one to blame.

And I don’t think he meant that women should cover themselves from neck to ankle in order to prevent men from lusting after them.

It seems to me Jesus was trying to make the point that we humans should keep our minds — as well as our bodies — in check.

Bonci’s predicament reminded me of a story I heard once — I believe it was in one of those Behind-the-Music-Driven-Revealed-True-Hollywood-Unplugged shows — about pop darling Jessica Simpson.

Long before she squeezed into her Daisy Dukes and started appearing on red carpets half-dressed, Simpson, the daughter of a onetime pastor, wanted to be a contemporary Christian singing star.

Her career crooning for Christ got derailed in part because Christian record company executives told her — at the tender age of 14 or 15 — that she looked too sexy because of her . . . duhn duhn duhhhhhn . . . big boobs.

At the time, according to the video evidence shown, Simpson was partial to outfits that looked like they had been designed by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Poor lamb.

Rather than have their daughter subjected to a spiritual identity crisis or a theologically fueled messed-up body image, Simpson’s parents say they steered her into the secular music world where, generally, an ample bosom is considered a blessing, not a curse.

It seems to have worked out well for Simpson the starlet, at least in terms of her career. I wouldn’t venture a guess about her spirituality or body image. That’s between her and her Maker.

Being pretty, attractive, sexy — yes sexy — even, is not an impediment to being pious, faithful, or devout.

The measure of a woman’s worth so often is measured by how she looks.

The quality of her soul certainly should not be.

But the Boncis and Simpsons of the world are in good company.

Look at the bad rap Mary Magdalene got for the first 1,900 or so years of church history. She was one of Jesus’ closest, most devoted followers, before and after his death, according to scripture.

And they called her a prostitute. It wasn’t until 1969 that the Vatican reversed its official stance on Mary Magdalene and said she wasn’t a hooker.

Biblical texts don’t tell us much about her back story, but by most popular accounts, Mary Magdalene was a beautiful woman.

Some stories imply that one might accurately describe her as sexy.

But it didn’t keep her from being a saint.