Vatican: Animal Allies Arrested for Urging Pope Francis to Denounce Bullfights

07.08.2024

Rome – Moments ago, PETA supporters wearing T-shirts reading, “Stop Blessing Corridas,” and holding signs saying, “Bullfighting Is a Sin,” were arrested during the General Audience at the Vatican. The activists appealed to Pope Francis to cut the Catholic Church’s ties with bullfighting and finally use his position and influence to defend bulls and condemn the despicable blood sport.

Images of the action are available here. Credit: Esa Ennelin

Video is available here.

“The Bible asks us to show mercy to all of God’s creations, yet bulls are being tormented, stabbed, and slaughtered in front of jeering crowds by assailants blessed by Catholic priests,” says PETA Vice President for the UK and Europe Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA is calling on His Holiness to condemn the vile bullfighting industry and cut the Church’s ties with these bloody, merciless 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 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 bullfighting, 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 has previously called on Pope Francis to speak out against bullfighting through letters signed by priests, protests, disruptions, ad campaigns, and more.

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 the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

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

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