Animal rights group PETA beamed a message onto the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace urging Pope Leo XIV to end purported Church ties to bullfighting.
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Animal rights activists have projected a light display onto the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace in their latest protest against bullfighting.
On the evening of May 26, a large light display was projected by PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] onto the exterior walls of the Apostolic Palace, which is the traditional home of the popes.
The short display addressed to Pope Leo XIV contained the message that “200,000 Catholics beg you to end war on bulls.”
It then showed AI generated images of Christ admonishing a bullfighter dressed in traditional costume, with the caption “what would Jesus do? Bull fighting is a sin.”
Another image showed Mary seated on the ground cradling a dead bull in her arms.
“Cut the Church’s ties to bull fighting,” read a final message, adding “Pope Leo XIV: End the war on bulls.”
In a media statement, PETA’s vice president for Europe, Mimi Bekhechi, explained the move as the latest in their series of public demonstrations against bullfighting:
Hundreds of thousands of compassionate Catholics around the world have spoken out against the torture of bulls in bullfights, and it’s time for the Church to do the same. PETA entities are calling on Pope Leo XIV to start off his papacy by doing what we believe Pope Francis would have, and denounce the torture and killing of bulls during Catholic celebrations.
The organization said that some 200,000 signatures had been collected from self-identified Catholics in petitions directed to Pope Francis, seeking his backing to end bullfighting.
Shortly after Leo’s election to the papal throne, PETA urged him to take action against bullfighting and lamented that Pope Francis did not do so:
We pray that you will find it in your heart to follow Pope Francis’ compassionate legacy by doing what he surely would have done had he had more time on Earth, and cut the Catholic Church’s sacrilegious ties to the torture killing of bulls for entertainment. In predominantly Catholic countries, this hideously cruel blood sport … survives in part because the Church permits its promoters to use the Church’s and the saints’ names.
As a body, PETA activists have increased their profile in the Vatican in recent months. Last year, PETA protesters were arrested after staging a demonstration during a papal audience and public information campaigns have also been staged by virtue of well-situated ads around Rome.
Earlier in 2024, two activists disrupted the ecumenical Vespers presided over by Pope Francis at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in January.
Late last year, PETA protestors disrupted the papal motorcade on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, leading to their arrest.
PETA writes that bullfighting is linked to the Church by virtue of the fact that “every year, tens of thousands of bulls are slaughtered in bullfighting festivals held in honor of Catholic saints.”
Similar campaigns have been made by others, including Catholic Concern for Animals, an organization which urged interested individuals to protest outside nunciatures in their respective countries.
While not so prevalent in modern society as it once was some centuries ago, the practice of bullfighting remains chiefly in South American countries, along with Spain and Portugal.
The practice has in fact received papal censure from a number of popes, but most famously St. Pius V. The Dominican pope issued a papal edict in 1567 named “Super prohibitione agitationis Taurorum & Ferarum.”
His text threatened the penalty of excommunication for those princes who permitted or enabled bullfighting.
Pius V also forbade anyone from taking part in such actions although did not levy excommunication against ordinary citizens. Clerics, however, were threatened with excommunication if they were involved in the activities, and any men who died during a bullfight were to be denied a Church burial.
Pius V described bullfights as “spectacles which are removed from Christian piety and charity, in which bulls and wild animals are challenged in circuses and plazas … such cruel and base spectacles of the devil and not of man.”
His edict was short-lived, however, as Gregory XIII lifted penalties imposed on laymen and Clement VIII then lifted the laws further in 1597, only prohibiting bullfighting on holy days and banning clergy from attending.
Much debate has taken place among moral theologians regarding the ethical nature of the modern style of bullfighting; however, the events are no longer officially linked to the Catholic Church, nor does the Pope have a direct role in facilitating such events.
