Has Jimmy Lai been hung out to dry?

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Jimmy Lai has embraced his destiny. Last Wednesday the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily, was arrested on ginned-up fraud charges. On Thursday he was clapped into jail as a national security risk. Thus did a man who started the week a Hong Kong billionaire end it a Chinese dissident.

Mr. Lai’s jailing has provoked condemnation from figures as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and New York Rep. Eliot Engel. They have been joined by journalists, activists and politicians such as the Labour Party’s Sarah Champion and other members of Parliament who on Monday raised Mr. Lai’s plight in Britain’s House of Commons.

But there is one place where China’s bullying elicits only silence: the Vatican. Which is strange, because Jimmy Lai is not only Hong Kong’s most well-known champion of democracy; he is also its most prominent Catholic layman. At a moment when he and his family most need their shepherd, Pope Francis is MIA. - The Silence of Pope Francis by William McGurn

Preoccupied?


Often, Francis identifies war, poverty, hunger, and climate change as impediments to the common good. Likewise, he argues in Fratelli Tutti that meeting people’s basic material needs is critical to ensuring that the common good is achieved and a meaningful sense of freedom preserved. Yet the op-ed says nothing about the spiritual hardships facing those who, due to government restrictions, have been denied the Eucharist. Why does Francis not stress the importance of religious liberty? Why does he treat freedom as a political matter—the relationship between man and the state, and not between man and God? After all, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” - The Mass Is Under Attack. Will Francis Speak? by F.A. Grabowski

Priorities?


Around the world, voices have been raised in support of Hong Kong’s brave pro-democracy demonstrators. Has the Holy See’s voice been heard? If so, I missed it and so did many others. Are strong representations in favor of religious freedom and other basic human rights being made by Vatican officials behind the scenes in Beijing and Rome? One might hope so. But if the Holy See’s current China policy is in fact a reprise of its failed Ostpolitik in central and eastern Europe during the 1970s, those representations are more likely tepid and wholly ineffectual.

With one of its most courageous Catholic sons now in the dock and facing what could be life-threatening imprisonment, the Vatican now faces a defining choice: Jimmy Lai or Xi Jinping? - The Vatican's Choice: Jimmy Lai or Xi Jinping by George Weigel

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