PETA Activists Arrested While Blocking Popemobile Over Bullfights Sanctioned by the Church
26 Sept 2024
PETA Activists Arrested While Blocking Popemobile Over Bullfights Sanctioned by the Church
Luxembourg – Moments ago, Pope Francis’ procession through Luxembourg City was disrupted by a group of PETA supporters who threw themselves in front of the popemobile to plead with His Holiness to cut the Catholic Church’s ties to bullfighting and condemn the vile blood sport. Wearing shirts reading, “Stop Blessing Corridas!” and bearing signs proclaiming, “Bullfighting Is a Sin!”, the animal defenders knelt in front of the pontiff’s vehicle until police violently dragged them to the ground and even threw one over a wall before putting them in handcuffs and arresting them.
A video of the disruption is available here.
“Priests’ blessings of matadors who inflict agony on terrified bulls before violently killing them is a grotesque mockery of Christ’s teachings of mercy and compassion,” says PETA Vice President Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA is calling on Pope Francis to denounce bullfighting as an affront to God and end 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, tormentors 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 16th 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:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
#