On Dec. 28, the day when the Catholic Church commemorates the feast of the Holy Innocents, Spanish-speaking cities in Latin America and Spain will join together in the “Light Up Life” campaign, an initiative that advocates for the defense of life from conception and the preservation of the innocence of children.

The campaign, called by various pro-life organizations including the National Front for the Family and 40 Days for Life, encourages people to take action with a message on social media: “You don’t abort a child, you don’t sexualize a child, you don’t indoctrinate a child… Children are sacred!”

“We will gather in the streets and squares of many countries and light a candle for the innocent aborted children. We will gather as sentinels of life, with candles lit, because as on that night of times past, Herod continues killing innocent children... Herod today is the genocide of abortion,” the organizers’ manifesto explains.

​According to the campaign, like last year more than 100 cities will participate in this event, lighting a light symbolized by candles as a sign of “the determined will to safeguard the life and integrity of our children.”

The effort seeks to “light up life” in order to base society “on the principles of Christian humanism.”

The campaign manifesto points out the “serious risk” in which children currently find themselves because “governments do not protect them.” With this public gesture for life, they seek to reaffirm their commitment to “keep the massacre of innocent aborted children in the public debate” and to the fight against the indoctrination and abuse of minors.

In addition, they reaffirm their determination to reverse the “laws that protect the culture of death and those that validate the indoctrination and sexualization of childhood and adolescence” that has led some children to fall into the “prisons of sexual exploitation, pornography, and pedophilia.”

“We also light our lights for all these children who are torn from their families to turn them into the fodder of vice and crime,” the manifesto states.

“For all these reasons,” the pro-life organizations state, “each light we carry bears the names of many children whose lives have been taken by the predatory machinery of abortion” as well as the names of “those whom ideologies and laws have left without a soul.”

This story was first publishedby ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.