Clergy Abuse Victim Speaks Against Church’s Silence on Bullfighting

“I still wonder how one who preached compassion took pleasure in cruelty.” These are the powerful words from a clergy abuse victim who, in a heart-wrenching new PETA video, draws on his own experience to question the Roman Catholic Church’s ties to bullfighting. In the video, Daniel Paden—a PETA employee who has dedicated his career to combating cruelty to animals—makes a compelling plea that the Church and Pope Leo XIV condemn all forms of abuse and violence, towards humans and our fellow animals alike. Watch it here:

Paden speaks candidly about his own experience of sexual abuse by a priest, highlighting a troubling contradiction within the Church. Despite Church teachings that humans should not “cause animals to suffer or die needlessly,” some priests still actively and publicly support bullfighting. In these events, bullfighters mercilessly torment and mutilate bulls before violently killing them, often as part of festivals held in honor of saints.

Bullfighting Goes Against Christ’s Teaching of Love and Mercy

Bulls are social, sensitive individuals who love and protect their families—but every year, tens of thousands of them suffer slow, agonizing deaths in bullfighting arenas. The bloody ritual begins with an assailant on horseback driving a lance into a bull’s back and neck, followed by others plunging harpoons, or banderillas, into his flesh. When blood loss renders the animal too weak to stand, the matador delivers a final, lethal sword thrust to his lungs. Often, the bull is still conscious as his ears or tail are cut off and presented to the matador as a gruesome trophy, before his body is dragged from the arena.

Does this sound righteous to you? Of course not—yet, Catholic priests often officiate at religious ceremonies in bullrings. Some even “fight” bulls in arenas while dressed in a cassock.

Paden calls on the Church to do what’s right by cutting ties with the bullfighting industry. “Christ calls on us to protect the powerless,” he says. “His Church must side with victims of abuse in all its forms.”

Take Action to End Bullfighting

Pope Leo’s predecessor, 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 canonized—banned bullfighting, which he described as “cruel and base spectacles of the devil” and contrary to “Christian piety and charity.”

Bullfighting has no place in Christian celebrations. Please join us in urging the Pope to condemn this cruel spectacle: