Jimmy Lai, a Catholic imprisoned in Hong Kong: his son pleads for his release

On 16 September 2026, in Washington, Sébastien Lai testified before a commission of the United States Congress to plead for the release of his father, Jimmy Lai, a Catholic of seventy-eight, founder of a Hong Kong pro-democracy newspaper sentenced this year to twenty years in prison under the national-security law imposed by Beijing. He addressed his appeal to Pope Leo XIV and to Xi Jinping, on the eve of a meeting planned for 24 September between the Chinese leader and the American president.

A diabetic, the old man has spent nearly six years in solitary confinement, and his son describes a body coming apart: “He now suffers from his heart. His nails are falling out. His teeth are rotting. In summer, in the heat, he bleeds all over from his rashes.” After a public outcry, Jimmy Lai may “sporadically” receive communion, which the prison administration first said was impossible in a solitary cell. Guards are even reported to have rehearsed the course of his eventual death.

His son says it plainly: “It would surely help for the pope to speak my father’s name. The head of the Catholic faith holds an immense moral power, above all in a case that touches a Catholic.” And he adds: “My father is no threat. His imprisonment makes him a symbol of injustice; his death in prison would be an infamy. Let Jimmy Lai return home to his own, and may he sit beside his daughter in her hardest hour.” That daughter, his sister Claire, has just begun chemotherapy in London.

The Church has never ranked the relief of prisoners among the options: it is one of the seven corporal works of mercy, and Our Lord makes it the very matter of the Judgment: “I was in prison, and you came to me.” The fifth commandment forbids any attempt on the life and health of one’s neighbour; to let a man waste away by design falls under that prohibition. And to deprive a Catholic of the sacraments, when the Church holds them for the viaticum of the dying, adds to the civil injustice a cruelty that reaches the soul.

We do not weigh here the outcome of a summit or the calculations of the powerful. We weigh the acts. A man of seventy-eight held in solitary until he loses his health, from whom communion was first to be withheld, is a prisoner whom charity obliges us to succour. That Rome maintains no diplomatic relations with Beijing, and that a 2018 accord on the appointment of bishops is denounced by its critics as a gag placed on the Church’s voice concerning the Chinese persecutions, dispenses no one from the duty of naming injustice for what it is. Tradition does not weigh probabilities; it weighs what is done.

Sources. Gospel according to Saint Matthew, xxv, 36 (Douay-Rheims, from the Vulgate), on the visiting of prisoners set to the account of the Judgment; Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment and the corporal works of mercy.