Breaking: PETA Activist Releases Balloons Inside Iconic Church, Urges Pope Francis to Denounce Cruel Bullfights

04.10.2024

Rome – Moments ago, on the feast of St Francis of Assisi – the Catholic Church’s patron saint of animals – a PETA supporter entered the San Francesco a Ripa church and released helium balloons bearing the message, “Honour St Francis: Condemn Bullfighting,” to the vaulted ceiling. St Francis resided at the site during his visits to Pope Innocent III in Rome in the 13^th century. A video of the action is available here, and photos are available here.

Credit: Matteo Minnella

“Priests’ blessings of matadors, who subject terrified bulls to agony before violently killing them, flies in the face of St Francis’ teachings that all animals are brothers and sisters under God,” says PETA Vice President Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA is calling on Pope Francis to live up to his namesake by denouncing bullfighting and ending the Church’s shameful affiliation with these unholy spectacles.”

Every year, tens of thousands of bulls are tormented and slaughtered in bullfighting festivals around the world, many of which are held in honour of Catholic saints. During these events, assailants on horses drive lances into a bull’s back before others plunge banderillas into his upper 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 him by plunging a sword into his lungs or, if that fails, cutting his spinal cord with a knife. The bull may be paralysed but still conscious as the matador cuts off his ears or tail 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 16^th century, Pope Pius V – who has since been canonised – banned bullfights, which he described as “cruel and base spectacles of the devil and not of man” and contrary to “Christian piety and charity”. Paragraph #2418 of the Catechism 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 or abuse in any other way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

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

#