New PETA Ad Featuring the Virgin Mary Calls for Compassion for Bulls

 

04.12.2024

Rome – In time for the celebration of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary on the 8th of December, a provocative message has appeared throughout Rome: an image of the Virgin Mary protecting a bull from a matador, along with a call for the Catholic church to sever its ties with the violent practice of bullfighting. The appeal, part of PETA’s campaign calling on Pope Francis to condemn the torture of bulls, is displayed on two sight-seeing buses that loop around central Rome, passing by all major landmarks.

Stefano Carofei

Campagna Peta What would Mary do ?

 

Images are available here. Credit: Stefano Carofei

“The Virgin Mary is celebrated as the image of compassion, yet the church refuses to practice the same sentiment towards all living beings,” says PETA Vice President for Europe Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA is calling on the Catholic Church to stop supporting the violent bullfighting industry, and we urge merciful people everywhere to stay far away from these archaic spectacles.”

Every year, tens of thousands of bulls are slaughtered in bullfighting festivals around the world, many of which are held in honour of Catholic saints – including festivities dedicated to the Virgin Mary. During these events, assailants on horses drive lances into a bull’s back and neck before others plunge banderillas into his back, inflicting acute pain whenever he turns his head and impairing his range of motion. Eventually, when the bull becomes weak from blood loss, a matador appears and attempts to kill the animal by plunging a sword into his lungs. A knife is used to cut his spinal cord. The bull may be paralysed but still conscious as his ears or tail are cut off and presented to the matador as a trophy and his body is dragged from the arena.

Pope Francis wrote in his encyclical Laudato Si’, “Every act of cruelty towards any creature is ‘contrary to human dignity’,” and as far back as the 16th century, Pope Pius V – who has since been canonised – banned bullfighting, which he described as “cruel and base spectacles of the devil and not of man” and contrary to “Christian piety and charity”. The doctrine of the Catholic Church clearly states that humans should not “cause animals to suffer or die needlessly”, yet Catholic priests often officiate at religious ceremonies in bullrings and minister to bullfighters in arena chapels. Some even attack bulls in arenas while dressed in a cassock.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow PETA on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

Sascha Camilli +44 207 923 6244; [email protected]

 

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