Continuing its commitment to abusing the religious freedom and human rights of its people, the government of the People’s Republic of China, in collaboration with the Hong Kong government, began the trial this week of media mogul Jimmy Lai, who is charged with publishing seditious material — and faces a life sentence if convicted.
Lai had been a strong advocate for democratic freedom in Hong Kong for more than 20 years. In 1995, he founded the now-defunct newspaper Apple Daily, a popular pro-democracy publication critical of Beijing’s steady erosion of Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms, as a vehicle to bring attention to the loss of human rights. Lai was arrested in August 2020 under a new national security law — one designed to curtail free speech — passed by China’s Communist-controlled government.
A devout Catholic, Lai was baptized and received into the Church in 1997 by Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 91-year-old bishop emeritus of Hong Kong who has himself been arrested and prosecuted under that same security law. Zen has long advocated for underground Catholics in mainland China, where Catholics continue to be persecuted. (READ MORE: Naming Names: The World’s Worst Religious Persecutors)
Unfortunately, concerns about the marginalized and imprisoned Catholics — including priests and bishops — in the underground Church in China remain unrecognized by Pope Francis, who told a journalist in May 2019 that “My dream is China.… Relations with China are good, very good.” Pope Francis claimed that the Sino-Vatican agreement he signed in September 2018 with representatives of the Chinese government united Catholics in the Communist country. In that agreement, Pope Francis regularized the status of the Chinese bishops who had been ordained (illicitly) by the Communist government through the Chinese-led “Patriotic Church.”
As of now, this agreement has failed to end the arrest and imprisonment of Catholic priests and bishops, yet Pope Francis continues to laud the “unity” of both churches in China, telling a journalist in 2019: “The other day two Chinese bishops came to me, one who came from the underground church and the other from the patriotic church, already recognized as brothers.… They know that they must be good patriots and that they must take care of the Catholic flock.” That same year, Monsignor Stefano Li Side, the underground bishop of Tianjin, died in captivity. The bishop had refused to be part of the Communist-sanctioned Church and had been exiled to a mountain village under house arrest.
Pope Francis has said nothing about the persecution of priests and bishops in China and the brutal history of the formation of the government-created Patriotic Catholic Association, designed to control the Catholic Church under Communist dictator Mao Zedong in the 1950s. So it is no surprise to faithful Catholics that Pope Francis has even less to say about the arrest of Zen and the current travails of Jimmy Lai. (READ MORE: Bishop Strickland and the Decay of Catholic Culture)
The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn published an article on Dec. 7, 2020, lamenting “The Silence of Pope Francis” on Jimmy Lai’s imprisonment. He wrote:
Alas, Pope Francis not only chooses to see no evil in China, he won’t hear of any either. In September, Cardinal Zen flew to Rome on his own initiative to talk to Pope Francis about what Beijing was doing to the Catholic faithful in Hong Kong and China. Pope Francis refused to see him. Yet later the pope found the time to discuss justice and inequality with an NBA players union delegation which presented him with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
Beyond Pope Francis, there has been deafening silence from the majority of the Catholic bishops — other than New York City’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan and the U.S. Military Services’ Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, who joined eight other Catholic bishops from India, Nigeria, Australia, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland to call for the immediate and unconditional release of Lai last month.
It seems that few have the courage to confront China. While the Catholic University of America awarded the heroic Jimmy Lai an honorary degree in 2022, the University of Notre Dame refused to even consider bestowing such an honor — despite lobbying efforts to do so by students and faculty members. A plea in the Irish Rover and an article in Scholastic by the Rev. Wilson Miscamble, professor of history, fell on deaf ears within the Notre Dame administration. It must be noted that Notre Dame has gratefully accepted lucrative contracts from China — as have other Catholic colleges and universities, including Boston College and Fairfield University.
That is truly the problem. China’s efforts appear to have succeeded in silencing the very people — including Pope Francis — who could have made a difference. As McGurn writes, Cardinal Zen once said that “Hong Kong hearts have been ‘broken’ by the lack of encouragement from the pope amid the protests and mass arrests that have marked their continuing struggle with Beijing.” It is not too late for Pope Francis to intervene. In fact, it is not too late for all those who care about freedom to rally to the defense of Jimmy Lai and all who are persecuted under this growing totalitarianism in Hong Kong.
Anne Hendershott, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology and the director of the Veritas Center at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.
