The Jimmy Lai Sentence and the Vatican’s Scandalous Silence

As I noted in a previous analysis, the Church led by Pope Leo XIV will have to confront, this year, a series of important issues destined to produce effects that will extend into the years to come, regardless of the decisions that are made. We have seen, first of all, the risk of a schism “on the left,” linked to the German Synodal Way; secondly, the specular risk of a schism “on the right,” connected to the possible episcopal ordinations of the SSPX. To these two fronts, a third issue of grave importance for Pope Prevost has forcefully re-emerged: the longstanding relations between the Holy See and China.

The issue has returned to the center of attention following the recent conviction against Jimmy Lai, a symbolic figure of Catholicism and democracy in China. On February 8, in fact, the West Kowloon court in Hong Kong sentenced the Chinese entrepreneur to 20 years in prison, a penalty second only to the death sentence. A decision made, according to the judges, out of regard for the advanced age of the accused—78 years—and his precarious health conditions.

Considering that Lai has spent the last five years of his life in a maximum-security prison, totally isolated, it is evident that the sentence imposed is, in fact, a death sentence, and the false humanity displayed by the Chinese court is merely a rhetorical device designed to mask the political nature of the trial.

Let us try to understand the true meaning of Jimmy Lai’s arrest, not only for the Catholic Church, but for the entire West.

Why Chinese communism fears Catholicism

In the People’s Republic of China, only five religions are formally recognized: Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Recognition does not, however, mean religious freedom. Sinicization is the cultural strategy pursued by Xi Jinping, in power since 2012, aimed at subordinating all aspects of Chinese life to the interests and ideological identity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Any religious expression that goes beyond this framework is considered illegal.

Treatment reserved for the five recognized religions is not homogeneous. Formal recognition is only the first level. What truly matters is the degree of threat the regime attributes to each religion. The CCP evaluates three criteria: origin, structure, and influence.

A true religious hierarchy thus emerges. At the top stands Taoism, an autochthonous tradition functional to the identity narrative promoted by Xi Jinping, who is leading a selective restoration of tradition in which Marxism is no longer opposed to the “ancient world,” as Mao desired, but presented as its natural development.

Some schools of Buddhism are also rooted in China. Although subjected to particularly rigid control in Tibet due to geopolitical tensions with India, it is nonetheless used by the CCP not only as an instrument of internal legitimation but also as a form of cultural projection abroad.

Because of Protestantism’s ties with foreign environments, particularly American ones, it is considered potentially sensitive from a security standpoint. However, channeled within state structures, it is regarded as an inconvenient but manageable phenomenon, as it lacks a unifying transnational element.

Islam is perceived as more than problematic insofar as it is associated with the identity and separatist dynamics of the Uyghurs in the western regions of the country. In particular, in recent years, there has been a growing adherence among Uyghurs to Salafism, which preaches pan-Islamism and the application of sharia. Consequently, Islam is subject to particularly severe control and repression.

Catholicism is considered the most dangerous religion because its universal hierarchical structure, with a center of authority external to the state, makes it difficult to adapt to a model of nationalized religion. Distrust increased, especially from the pontificate of Pius XII, when the Vatican openly sided with the Atlantic bloc in an anti-Soviet key, a line that reached its apex under John Paul II.

In China, the Catholic community is divided between the ‘official’ Church, recognized and controlled by the state with its own hierarchy, and the ‘underground’ Church, faithful to Rome and considered illegal. This dualism has fueled suspicion and conflict: for decades the two episcopal hierarchies have remained parallel, with bishops recognized by Beijing but not by the Holy See, and vice versa.

It is in this perspective that the Sino-Vatican agreements, stipulated in secret form in 2018, are situated. 

The parallel stories of Jimmy Lai and the secret agreements

Jimmy Lai, originally from mainland China, fled at a very young age to Hong Kong, where he built a brilliant entrepreneurial career in the textile sector. The political turning point came after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. From then on, he publicly broke with Beijing and directed his activities toward independent journalism. He founded the daily Apple Daily, which became one of the main press organs critical of the CCP, with investigations into corruption, abuses of power, and restrictions of civil liberties.

In the 1990s, Lai converted to Catholicism. His religious identity intertwined with political commitment: defense of religious freedom, support for civil rights, and backing for the principle ‘one country, two systems.’

At the same time, informal channels of contact were developing between more progressive ecclesiastical circles in America and the Chinese authorities. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick maintained personal relationships with many high-ranking state prelates, among them the Jesuit bishop of Shanghai, Aloysius Jin Luxian, at the time not recognized by the Holy See. In an article published in The Atlantic in 2007, McCarrick stated that he had transmitted messages coming from Jin to Rome, thus acting as an informal channel between Beijing and the Vatican.

In 2000, relations between China and the Holy See became strained because of the canonizations of Augustine Zhao Rong and 119 other Chinese martyred between 1648 and 1930. Nevertheless, McCarrick went to Beijing for three days on a private visit in August 2003. The Holy See had to clarify that the visit had no negotiating mandate. Despite this official statement, in 2005, the Vatican officially recognized Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian. Under Benedict XVI, Jin was also summoned among the participants of an important international synod, but the regime forbade him to attend.

In 2006, some documents made public through WikiLeaks revealed that representatives of the Chinese ‘official’ Church were working to minimize the media impact of persecutions against the clandestine community, without concern for evangelization activities.

After the election of Pope Francis, McCarrick allegedly declared that he had been received by the pontiff and that he had gone the following day to China to carry forward, in an informal manner, the negotiation with Beijing.

While these diplomatic channels were consolidating, in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai’s position became increasingly exposed, as he actively participated in protests against the extradition law toward mainland China and denounced the erosion of the city’s autonomy. On June 30, 2020, Beijing imposed on Hong Kong the National Security Law, which introduced crimes of secession, subversion, and collusion with foreign powers formulated in broad and vague terms.

On August 10, 2020, Lai was arrested on charges of collusion with foreign forces. Less than a year later, on June 17, 2021, Apple Daily was forced to close after the freezing of the publishing group’s assets.

On the diplomatic level, the Sino-Vatican agreement was taking more concrete shape. The talks were conducted discreetly by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s secretary of state, culminating in the signing of a provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops in Beijing in September 2018. The text remains secret to this day. The agreement was renewed for a two-year period in 2020 and then again in 2022; on October 22, 2024, the renewal was for four years, expiring in October 2028.

In December 2023, Jimmy Lai’s trial began. Among the most controversial elements was the retroactive application of the national security law. In February 2026, Lai ultimately received cumulative sentences of up to twenty years of imprisonment.

Why the Vatican needs Beijing’s secret agreements

Amid these developments, the Holy See has remained extremely reserved. Jimmy Lai’s case and Sino-Vatican relations thus unfold on parallel tracks: the growing repression of a Catholic symbol of civil liberty and a cautious diplomatic accord with the government that convicted him.

To understand why the Vatican viewed these secret agreements as advantageous, one must consider an often unspoken factor: Xi Jinping’s China shares with Pope Francis’ Vatican (a vision that appears to have endured within the Roman Curia after his death) certain outlooks—anti-Americanism (that is, anti-capitalism), geopolitical multilateralism, Third-Worldism—as well as affinities in areas such as liturgical inculturation and synodalism.

Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian, for example, as recounted in this book, justified the appointment of bishops by the CCP by saying that, in the ancient Church, bishops were elected by the “people” (a concept instrumentalized and much cherished by Communist leaders) and that the Bishop of Rome would have held a merely presidential role. 

Moreover, Jin advocated a greater contamination of local cultures in the Eucharistic rite. Just like Francis.

The affinities between Xi Jinping and Francis were acknowledged, at the time, by McCarrick himself. In 2016, in an interview with the Global Times, the progressive American cardinal went so far as to emphasize the “affinities between Pope Francis and Xi Jinping,” presenting them as a “historic opportunity”:

Many of the things that concern China also concern Pope Francis: attention to the poor, our civilization and above all ecology. I see many elements that could really open many doors, because President Xi and his government are sensitive to the same issues that are close to Pope Francis’s heart.

Francesco Sisci, one of the world’s foremost experts on Sino-Vatican relations, explained that the Chinese government sees in the Vatican the most effective and most widespread soft power instrument in the world, namely, the ability to influence other countries not through military or economic force, but through cultural values.

It is reasonable to think that among the clauses of the agreement between the Holy See and China, there is a commitment on the part of the Vatican not to intervene publicly on religious persecutions and on political initiatives, internal or external, carried out by the Chinese regime.

This would coherently explain the embarrassing and scandalous silence of the Holy See in the face of cases such as that of Jimmy Lai, as well as the absence of any explicit denunciation of the authoritarian social systems imposed by Beijing.

The same silence emerges in an important magisterial document such as “Dilexi te,” which I discussed in this analysis, which does not hesitate to criticize the West but carefully avoids mentioning China’s responsibility, even though poverty and pollution there are structural and systemic, masked by pervasive state ecological propaganda.

In this framework, the silence of the Holy See no longer appears as mere diplomatic prudence but as the direct consequence of an agreement that, in practice, limits the prophetic freedom of the Church precisely with regard to one of the most repressive and dangerous regimes of our time.