Animal rights activists disrupt Pope’s weekly Vatican audience

Two Peta protesters walk down aisle inside Paul VI hall holding signs calling for supreme pontiff to ‘stop blessing bullfighting’

Two animal rights protestors disrupted Pope Francis’s weekly audience at the Vatican with shouts for an end to bullfighting.
The female activists from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) organisation held signs saying “Bullfighting is a sin” and wore T-shirts saying “Stop blessing bullfighting”.
The two women walked down an aisle inside the Vatican’s Paul VI hall staging their protest before being escorted from the venue by security officials.
Peta has long urged the Pope to cut the Catholic Church’s historic links and associations with bullfighting and to condemn the “despicable blood sport”.
The sport, which involves taunting and stabbing a bull in a ring before killing it, is a cultural tradition in Spain but remains legal in parts of France and South America.
“Tens of thousands of bulls are still being tormented and violently killed in bullrings every year,” Peta says on its website.
“Because these gruesome spectacles are often held “in honour” of Catholic saints and on holy days, the Catholic Church can and must help end this abuse by condemning bull torture in the name of religion.”
Francis was holding his first general audience after a month-long summer break in July. It was the second time that protesters affiliated with Peta had demonstrated at a papal event this year.
In January, two women held a similar protest about bullfighting during a prayer service featuring the pope at Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.
On that occasion two activists from Peta unfurled a banner featuring a photo of the Archbishop of Caracas, Baltazar Enrique Porras Corrado, who the organization has accused of being a bullfighting fan. The activists also claim that some Catholic clergy offer blessings to bullfighters.
Francis, who has made protection of the environment a signature issue of his 11-year papacy, does not appear to have publicly commented on bullfighting. But one of his predecessors, the 16th-century Pope Pius V, did outlaw bullfighting, calling the practice “better suited to demons rather than men.”
British priest Terry Martin recently made headlines for his opposition to bullfighting in a campaign with Peta and has also called on the pope to condemn it. 
The priest from West Sussex was pictured posing in a red chasuble next to a bull with the inscription: “It is a sin to torture animals.”