Vatican Disruption: Dramatic Moment PETA Activists Ambushed After Urging Pope to Condemn Bullfighting

03.06.2026

Vatican City – A dramatic protest interrupted Pope Leo XIV’s general audience in St Peter’s Square today, as two PETA supporters wearing “Bullfighting Is a Sin” T-shirts confronted the pontiff and urged him to sever the Catholic Church’s ties to bull torture.

Holding signs reading “Pope Leo: Help End Bullfighting”, the animal defenders called on the Pope to denounce the ritualised killing of bulls before being hauled away. The action comes just days before his visit to Spain, where thousands of bulls are slaughtered in bullfights every year in honour of Catholic saints.

Photos are available here (credit: Laura Uffa). Footage of the disruption is available here (credit: Aleda Amarillo).

“We have peacefully pleaded to Pope Leo for a year to speak out against the torture and killing of bulls,” says PETA Senior Vice President Mimi Bekhechi. “Inflicting suffering on animals is incompatible with Christ’s teachings of mercy and compassion and we are calling on the pope to take a clear moral stand and remind Catholics everywhere that bullfighting is un-Christian.”

Every year, tens of thousands of bulls are brutally tormented and killed in bullfighting festivals—many held in honour of Catholic saints. During these spectacles, lances tear into the bull’s flesh, banderillas are driven into his back, and, weakened and bleeding, he is stabbed through the lungs. Paralysed but often still conscious, he may be mutilated before his body is dragged from the arena.

The cruelty stands in stark contrast to Catholic teaching. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote that “every act of cruelty towards any creature is contrary to human dignity”. Centuries earlier, Pope Pius V condemned bullfighting as a “cruel and base spectacle of the devil”. The Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise forbids causing animals to suffer or die needlessly—yet bullfights continue to be intertwined with Catholic rituals.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—points out that when it comes to the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a bull is a dog is a boy. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow PETA on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

Sascha Camilli +44 (0) 20 7923 6249; [email protected]

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