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Nearly 7,000 pro-life advocates marched from Rome’s Colosseum to St. Peter’s Square on Sunday for the city’s inaugural March for Life. “We’ve never seen anything like this in Rome,” march co-organizer Juan Miguel Montes said of the event.
American cardinal Raymond L. Burke led a group of priests in the march. He said it brought back memories for him of “so many marches” in America. The cardinal was “pleased” that such an event has finally reached Rome. “I can only imagine that it will grow and increase every year and that it will be an important part in Italy, as it is in America, for the restoration of the respect for the dignity of human life,” he said.
The march was officially the second annual Italian national March for Life. The 2011 event was held in northern city of Desenzano, on Lake Garda.
23-year old seminarian Garrett Nelson of the Diocese of Great Falls-Billings, Montana, said that it was like the March for Life in the US, but with an extra quality. “It’s been on a more universal level,” said Nelson. “You see the world coming together to defend the dignity of human life and how important that is. It’s really exciting to see the young and the youth movement of the Church growing up and defending the dignity of human life.”
In addition to a strong American presence, the Italian core was joined by Germans, French and Hungarians. With enormous flags in hand, a Polish delegation brought up the rear of the more than a half-mile long string of marchers. Tibetan Buddhists even turned out to protest forced abortions in their homeland.
“What we’ve seen here is that there are always more young people in favour of life,” said the co-organizer Montes. “It’s the generation that should be ‘pro-abortion for education and culture’,” he said of the youthful turnout. “In reality, it is ‘anti-abortion’ and it is expressing itself in occasions like this one.”
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