His Beatitude Mor Ignatius Youssef III Younan, Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, San Francisco's Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and the Russian-Orthodox Bishop Antony of Vienna and Budapest have joined dozens of religious and academic figures at the 13th World Congress for the Family, held in Verona from 28-30 March.
Verona, the city made famous by Shakespeare's Rome and Juliet is also Europe's first officially "Pro-life City" and the congress focused especially on pro-life and pro-family issues, centred on the "natural family" based on the love between and man and a woman.
LGBT and feminist protestors mobbed the many leading political figures who came to support the congress and the Italian media accused the organisers of trying to bring back the middle ages. Various cultural and political leaders suffered threats and intimidation over their participation, but these efforts backfired as liberal journalists and politicans showed up at the meeting to make clear to the gathering that they supported the right to free speech.
A series of passionate interventions underlined Europe's "demographic winter" where every European country is facing gradual extinction due to the lack of new children. Matteo Salvini, the Italian vice premier, the Italian minister of education, various local politicians, together with European royals and official representatives of Hungary, Nigeria and several other countries, lent their voice to the Congress's principal demands: the universal definition of marriage as a union between and man and a woman, the exclusion of "Gender theory" and LGBT promotion from schools, government financial support for families to encourage them to have more children, financial assistance to women to dissuade them from aborting, and the recognition of the natural family as the most important institution in society.
gloria TV