Chastised Italian priest Antonio Rungi is claiming he was misunderstood.

But when a guy announces he’s going to stage a beauty pageant for nuns, he may as well pin a large target on his back.

One e-mail he received expressed hope that he’d burn in Hell, and his superiors called him on the carpet to say, in effect, “We don’t think so, Antonio. Please cease and desist.”

This all started when Rungi publicized the plan on his blog. “Miss Sister 2008” was to have been a worldwide online contest for nuns and novitiates 18 to 40.

Rungi said he just wanted to erase a stereotype.

“You really think nuns are old, stunted and sad?” he told one news outlet. “It’s no longer that way. There are nuns from Africa and Latin America who are really very, very lovely. The Brazilians, particularly.”

At that point, we’d like to think, the good father took a nice cold shower.

Rungi folded his tent a few days after his plan hit the media. He’s disappointed that so many people apparently had the knee-jerk response of thinking nuns would be sashaying down a catwalk in their sensible shoes.

Actually, Rungi said the nun pageant idea came to him on a swimming beach — and it came from nuns themselves.

He claims he was having a seaside chat with some sisters when they hit him with their brainstorm.

(Lest anyone get the wrong idea, it should be explained that Rungi was at the beach to promote another of his ministerial initiatives — encouraging sunbathers to say the rosary).

Rungi had expected 1,000 contestants to submit photos of themselves, leaving it up to them whether to appear in wimples — a nun’s head covering that leaves only the face exposed.

“Being ugly is not a requirement for becoming a nun,” Rungi said. “External beauty is a gift from God, and we mustn’t hide it.”

Internal beauty as well, he might have added.

Sister Julie Brandt is the vocations director for the Mankato province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. She thinks Rungi’s intentions were honorable, but his means were questionable.