COMMENTARY: What can Catholics do for Jimmy Lai at the moment?
At his May summit in Beijing, President Trump made an effort to convince Chinese leader Xi Jinping to release Jimmy Lai from his imprisonment in Hong Kong. Jimmy, whom I am honored to call a friend, is a 78-year-old diabetic who has been in solitary confinement some 700 days longer than the United States was engaged in World War II, and is now serving a 20-year sentence for threatening Chinese national security. That conviction has no more legal or moral validity than that of the Lord by Pontius Pilate. And I find it deeply moving that, in the prison cell where Jimmy does colored pencil sketches of religious scenes, many of them depict the Crucifixion; one of those sketches is among my most prized possessions. By conforming himself in prayer to the crucified Lord, Jimmy Lai is living his unjust punishment as an occasion of grace.
That, however, doesn’t change the brutal reality of his situation: namely, the virtual certainty that he will die in jail, having never been restored to his family, unless Emperor Xi lets him go into exile.
Donald Trump does not strike
