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ROME — Pro-life advocates from Italy and around the world will participate in a march and prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Square in the opening days of the Vatican’s Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, scheduled for October 5-19. The Vatican announced that October 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, a prayer vigil will be held in the square from 6:00 to 7:30 pm to allow pilgrims the opportunity to fulfill a request by Pope Francis for prayer for the Synod.

On the morning of Sunday, October 5 at 9:30 am, marchers will gather at the Piazza Cola di Rienzo and walk to St. Peter’s to request that the bishops defend and uphold the teaching of the Church. Organizers have invited “all, believers and non believers,” to publicly resist “these attacks upon the natural family.”

Toni Brandi, a long-time pro-life activist and editor of the magazine Notizie Pro-Life, told LifeSiteNews that the participation of pro-life and pro-family activists would aim at alerting the bishops of the Synod to the grave dangers the family faces.

Brandi called for “all Christians to support the initiative of Pope Francis to pray together to the Holy Spirit so that He may descend upon the Holy Father and the Synod Fathers to uphold the Church’s teachings on marriage, the family and sexuality.

“If you are unable to attend than light up a candle in your home and pray.”

“What we see today is an increasing and unprecedented assault against the natural family in Italy as well as in the EU and in the USA,” Brandi said. These threats come directly from the work of Neo-Marxists who have worked for decades in all institutions of western society, he said, saying the result has been “a terrible explosive mixture against traditional values.”

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Brandi pointed to the use of sex education in schools, an innovation of sexual revolutionaries in the 1970s who “brainwash our children from the earliest ages that to be homosexual, transsexual or bi-sexual is absolutely normal.” The promotion of pornography and contraceptives by schools has followed the regularization of sex education, and this has led to the skyrocketing of teenage pregnancies and STDs, Brandi said.

He said the Culture of Death is inextricably entwined with the Sexual Revolution that has resulted in global, billion-dollar industries: “The industries – often subsidized by the tax-payer – of abortion, of sex-changes, of in vitro fertilization, of drugs, of pornography and of contraceptives represent billions of dollars of income.”

“However, we must never despair,” he added, citing a decision this July at the UN Human Rights Council in which a large majority of representatives supported a resolution for the natural family.

Brandi said, “After all, there are only some 20 countries out of over 180 countries in the world being anti-family. In addition to being a holy Christian battle it is also a fight for logic, reason and common sense.

“So we know we can win but to win we must fight in the media, in the schools at our workplace and always spread the truth.”