Is bullfighting sinful?

Stuart Reid Charterhouse
The vote by the regional government of Catalonia to ban bullfighting provides me with the opportunity not only to challenge what is seen, not least by traditionalists, as the traditionalist view of bullfighting but to tell my only Catalonian joke.
An American friend of mine lived in London in the early 1980s and, to make ends meet, used to write occasionally for those Aussie freesheets. He once did a piece on the glories of London pubs and sent it in with his own headline: “Homage to Catatonia”.
When the paper came out, he saw that his headline had been changed to “Homage to Catalonia”. He was puzzled by this, since he’d made no mention of Catalonia. When he rang the paper to ask why the change had been made, a cheerful Aussie sub-editor said: “You got it wrong, mite. George Orwell’s book was Homage to Catalonia, not Homage to Catatonia.” What can you say? “Oh, right,” said my friend.
But bullfighting. Generally speaking, I suppose, traditionalist Catholics tend to be for bullfighting (in its oblique and crablike way, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1914 was rather supportive), while liberal Catholics tend not to be. Furthermore, as pro-life people have been pointing out in the past week, it says something about western humbug that the vote to ban bullfighting coincided with the introduction in Spain of newly liberalised abortion laws. To assert the so-called rights of animals while at the same time denying the rights of the most vulnerable in society is grotesque.
It does not follow, however, that if you condemn abortion you must defend bullfighting. Abortion bad does not equal bullfighting good. Traditionalists may not be aware of this, but there is a strong tradition of hostility to bullfighting in the Church (and to anything else that smacks of the Roman circus).
On November 1 1567, Pope St Pius V – hero of Trent and of the Tridentine Mass, hammer of the Turks – condemned bullfighting in his – don’t laugh – papal bull De Salute Gregis. It was a “cruel and base” spectacle, he said, “of the Devil and not of man”. It was a serious sin, so serious that Church burial was to be denied anyone killed in bullfights.
Times change, of course, and St Pius V was apparently not speaking ex-cathedra, but it might not be entirely safe to shrug off De salute. At any rate in 1940 Pope Pius XII – a Pope much traduced by progressives – cited the bull when he refused to meet a delegation of bullfighters in the Vatican.
Compassion towards animals is a very Christian thing. Jesus is the Lamb of God. John Henry Cardinal Newman, whose beatification Pope Benedict will preside over next month, once said in a sermon: “Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God... there is something so dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power...” Some pedants will say that, actually, bulls can defend themselves. In theory, yes, but everything is stacked against the bull. He is tortured and humiliated by teams of men, and the tips of his horns are sawn off. Even on the rare occasions when he wins the fight he is not sent into comfortable retirement but is killed. You have to get rid of killer bulls, see, especially if they have had the wit to see that the way to survive is to attack the man, not his cape.
Consistency in these matters is impossible, and we are all humbugs. Bullfighting is far from being the only form of cruelty to animals. What about battery farming? Even if you have enough selfrespect not to eat KFC, you will almost certainly (and pretty frequently) eat birds that have been reared in vile conditions. But we don’t take pleasure in the misery of farm animals, and it could be that in some circumstances battery farming is necessary for the good of man.
Some of my best friends are fans of the bullfight. Jeremy Clark, for example, the author of “Low Life” in the Spectator, is just nuts about it. He still goes to Pamplona to see if he can outrun the bulls, and, no matter how hammered he is, he always finds that he can. Ten years ago I might have been tempted to go to Pamplona with him, but now the whole thing revolts me.
When you see that bull’s bewildered, staring eyes, his lolling tongue, his great bruised and bloodied body, you can feel nothing but contempt for bullfighting.
Not that I have even seen these things in the flesh, but I have been in Spanish bars where a bullfight is being shown on television. The first time, in Extremadura, the cameras zeroed in on the bull’s tackle – highlighting it/them in a circle while the rest of the screen went into shade. What kind of people are these, I wondered, that they ogle a bull’s balls.
Earlier this year, in Majorca, I saw a fight in which the matador failed to make a clean kill. He was pretty good with the flaring of the nostrils, the throwing back of the head, but he was a bit rubbish with the sword. The bull was left horribly wounded, and a gang came had to finish him off.
The fans weren’t best pleased, and the matador looked the way a professional goalkeeper looks when he has failed to save a goal, or so it seemed to my anything but sympathetic eyes. To begin with he looked penitent, remorseful, ashamed. Then his mood changed, first to self-pity, then to general reproach, then to defiance. “I’m gutted,” he was obviously saying, “but the bull was offside, innit?” Fox-hunting? Did someone say fox-hunting? I am all for fox-hunting, but fox-hunting is about the chase and not about the spectacle of lingering death. That, however, is another kettle of fish...