Jimmy Lai: A Victim of the Dangerous Silence of Vatican-China Relations

The ordeal of Hong Kong businessman and Catholic convert Jimmy Lai continues as he awaits trial on trumped-up charges of violating China's national security. As faithful lay Catholics, we urge the Holy See to break its silence on this matter by demanding Mr. Lai’s immediate release.    

Mr. Lai’s international legal team has submitted an urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture. It claims that the 76-year-old publisher has been in solitary confinement, often in his cell for 23 hours and 10 minutes a day, since late 2020; that he is diabetic, but has been denied access to independent medical care; and that the facility where he has been held is infamous for subjecting prisoners in solitary confinement to intolerable round-the-clock lighting and extreme temperatures. Mr. Lai is a convert to Catholicism; although he has been permitted occasional visits from priests, prison officials have banned them from bringing him Holy Communion.

Not even the most infamous criminals are subjected to this level of mistreatment in the United States. Why has the Holy See not condemned such cruelty?

Jimmy Lai was one of seven pro-democracy advocates arrested, convicted, and then exonerated for organizing a demonstration following the 2019 bid by the Hong Kong government to pass legislation that would have allowed political detainees to be deported to mainland China to face trial. But the saga didn’t end there. Mr. Lai now faces a potential life sentence in prison for violating the special region’s new “National Security Law.” His trial, which began in December 2023, is expected to resume in November. In the meantime he is wasting away in jail.

Amnesty International has declared Mr. Lai’s trial a “sham” and a blatant attack on the freedom of the press promised when Britain handed the territory back to China in 1997. Both the U.S. and British governments have called for his immediate release. Ten members of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, including New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Sydney’s Archbishop Anthony Fisher, signed a petition “calling on the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to immediately and unconditionally release Jimmy Lai.”

As for the Vatican? Crickets. Pope Francis has not once mentioned Jimmy Lai’s name in public.

Since his conversion in 1997, Mr. Lai has lived an earnest commitment to his Catholic faith and to its free exercise. In the Church’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council stated that “the right of man to religious freedom has its foundation in the dignity of the person.” The Declaration continues by asserting that “the Church should enjoy that full measure of freedom which her care for the salvation of men requires.” Prohibiting Mr. Lai from receiving Holy Communion denies his religious liberty and gravely interferes with the Church’s own legitimate autonomy. The Holy See must protest about this grave offence against religious freedom, and indeed the countless other assaults on the rights of Catholics and other Christians.

Prior to Hong Kong’s democracy protests, Mr. Lai was most well known as a successful entrepreneur. Having fled from Mao’s China with nothing, Mr. Lai built a large business. He thereby created wealth, delivered good and services to his customers, employed hundreds of people. Indeed, Mr. Lai’s life reflects his living out of what Pope John Paul II called “the right of economic initiative”—another theme stressed in Catholic social teaching from Vatican II onwards, including by Pope Francis who has often referred to the “noble vocation” of business. Beijing, however, has crushed Mr. Lai’s economic freedom, violated his property rights, and undermined his businesses as part of its overall assault on his liberty.

As an advocate of democracy, Jimmy Lai believes in the promises of the Catholic Church’s social teaching. As John Paul II explained in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, democratic systems are valuable when they “guarantee to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means.”

Mr. Lai, founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, also took to heart Pope Francis’s counsel that being a journalist is not about choosing a profession but embarking on a mission "to study and work to cure evil in the world." He listened to the words of John Paul II, who described the work of a journalist as “building a society based on solidarity, justice and love.” His reward for protecting these very principles in his home of Hong Kong is solitary confinement in a notoriously brutal jail.

What explains the Vatican’s apparent reticence to say anything about Beijing’s systematic violation of Mr. Lai’s freedom? A charitable explanation is that it reflects misguided diplomacy on Rome’s part. 

The pact with China was supposed to recognize the Pope’s authority over the Catholic Church in China while giving the government the right to nominate bishops for his consideration. In a 2022 interview with Jesuit-run America Magazine, Pope Francis asserted that “with China, I have opted for the way of dialogue. It is slow, it has its failures, it has its successes, but I cannot find another way.”

While we are at a loss to identify successes, the failures are far too obvious. Beijing has simply ignored its promise to allow the Pope to have the final say in episcopal appointments. The regime is even pressuring the Church in China to bend its beliefs and liturgical practices to the Chinese Communist Party’s demands. Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired Bishop of Hong Kong who received Jimmy Lai into the Church, warned that the Church’s “resounding silence [on China’s human rights abuses] will damage the work of evangelization.” 

We appreciate that when it comes to diplomatic relations with an authoritarian and Communist regime like China there is no easy solution. This doesn’t mean, however, that the Vatican should remain silent while the secret terms of the “dialogue” are set by China, particularly when it comes to targeting Catholics like Mr. Lai.