SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica, December 11, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Hundreds of thousands of pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals demonstrated “for life and family” in Costa Rica on December 3.
The national Catholic Bishops Conference organized the massive march through the streets to Central Park in the Costa Rican capital city of San Jose. The culmination of the event was an open Mass in Paseo Colon, the business hub of the city.
Catholic radio station Radio Fides posted on Facebook some amazing drone images from the march.
The “Walk for Life and Family” was promoted as a positive affirmation of universally beneficial Christian values. People carried signs supporting the sanctity of innocent human life, traditional one man/one woman marriage, male/female binary gender, parental rights, and religious freedom.
“The march is not against anyone or against something in particular, it’s in favor of Jesus and his teachings,” Bishop Ángel San Casimiro Fernández of Alajuela explained to the huge crowd. “We have two topics to propose, not impose: the first one is the respect and protection to human life in all its stages and dimensions. The other one is family, the most adequate environment for a human being to live in.”
Bishop Fernández welcomed not only Catholics but “Christians and Evangelicals” as he elaborated on championing the culture of life. “Defense of unborn life is intimately linked to the defense of any human right,” he said. “It supposes the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and in every stage of his development.”
The bishop, whose diocese is under the archdiocese of San José, said the responsibility of the state is to protect life and “resist” outside anti-life, anti-marriage, and anti-family pressure.
“We trust those who rule the reins of the three branches of government, attentive to the deepest convictions of the Costa Rican people, will make every effort to protect the first of all human rights, which is that of life (from the time) this is conceived, as well as (the rights of) people resisting campaigns for abortion, both born within the country, as those who try to pressure us from fronts of power in the international arena,” he said.
Fernández emphasized that the primary educator of children in sexual matters should not be the government but the child’s parents. The Costa Rican Ministry of Education had proposed “comprehensive,” contraception-based sex education classes for the nation’s schools.
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The event, attended by tens of thousands, was ignored by the mainstream media. Coverage in English was available only through Church Militant and the Costa Rica Star.
The people and the government of Costa Rica have resisted liberal global pressure to change its laws and continued to defend the sanctity of life and family. In 2013, thousands of Costa Rican Catholics marched against homosexual civil unions. And in 2011, Costa Rica hosted the Fifth World Pro-Life Congress. In 2008, the government prohibited a pro-abortion campaign encouraging women abort using the “morning after pill.”