Priest, friend of Jimmy Lai: ‘He reminds us of what it means to be free’

A priest and longtime friend of Catholic convert and media mogul Jimmy Lai recently shared about the iron courage of his friend, who advocated for democracy and freedom in Hong Kong and has subsequently spent more than four years in solitary imprisonment while awaiting his final sentence from a Hong Kong court. 

The West Kowloon Court recently began hearing the final arguments for the trial against Lai, 77, a citizen of the United Kingdom and self-made billionaire who founded an independent news publication called Apple Daily. Chinese officials first detained Lai in December 2020, and the Hong Kong government shut down his publication in June 2021, also arresting several of its staff and managers on charges of “endangering national security,” according to Amnesty International. 

At the time of his arrest, Lai was falsely accused of “collusion with foreign forces” and “sedition,” according to an Aug. 13 Free Press article by his friend Father Robert Sirico, a priest of the Diocese of Grand Rapids. 

Lai’s trial, which began in December 2023, is “a show trial — his guilt preordained, the judges handpicked by the Chinese Communist Party,” Fr. Sirico wrote. 

As he has awaited a sentence that could be up to life in prison, Lai has been subjected to terrible conditions, including oppressive temperatures, lack of daylight, and no independent medical care for his diabetes, according to Lai’s son Sebastien. His son spoke out on the conditions in September 2024 in an interview with the National Post, which was a part of a media tour aiming to put pressure on the Hong Kong government and courts amid his father’s ongoing trial. 

On Aug. 15, Lai’s lawyer said Lai experienced heart palpitations in prison, prompting a delay in beginning the closing arguments, according to AP News. The judges requested that Lai receive a heart monitor and medication before the arguments continued. 

AP News reported that at the hearing “the Hong Kong government alleged foreign media outlets had attempted to mislead the public about Lai’s medical care. It said a medical examination of Lai found no abnormalities and that the medical care he received in custody was adequate.”

The closing arguments have continued into this week and are scheduled to last a total of eight days, according to Fr. Sirico. 

“But as my friend Jimmy Lai would be the first to tell you, it’s not really about him at all,” Fr. Sirico wrote. “It’s a test of the seriousness of Western democracy.”

Fr. Sirico recounted how he met Lai in 1998 during a visit to Hong Kong. Lai had fled as a refugee from mainland China to Hong Kong when he was 12 and had since built the Apple Daily. 

“It immediately became evident that Jimmy’s passion for freedom, kindled by his horror at the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, drove him to champion human rights — economic and personal,” Fr. Sirico wrote. “After Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, the island’s freedoms began to unravel as the Chinese government assumed more and more authority over Hong Kong’s political and legal systems.”

In 2014, Lai protested publicly in a march alongside young Hong Kongers in the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, and in 2019 and 2020 participated and covered more pro-democracy protests. By June 2020, however, Xi Jinping implemented the controversial National Security Law, which criminalized dissent and “collusion with foreign forces” in Hong Kong, according to Fr. Sirico. 

Lai had all the means and connections to flee Hong Kong amid the CCP takeover, and yet he chose to stay, “unable to abandon his lifelong pursuit of freedom. … He knew this choice meant the worst could come. That’s exactly what happened,” Fr. Sirico wrote.

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When Lai’s trial picked up in January 2024, Fr. Sirico traveled back to Hong Kong to watch in solidarity with Lai. 

“There, I found a city deflated,” Fr. Sirico wrote. “The frenetic energy of the markets and the chatter of dim sum halls had dulled. Streets once electric with ambition and liberty now hummed with caution. The city felt like a ghost, its vibrancy dimmed by a quarter century of encroaching Chinese control.”

Hong Kong’s churches have also experienced independence being chipped away from them as the CCP’s “Sinicization” campaign deepened pressure for them to give religious fealty to state ideology, according to Fr. Sirico. The same Chinese control oppressing the Christian heritage of Hong Kong’s churches, schools and businesses is also controlling Lai’s trial, which is jury-less, and overseen by the hand-picked judges, Fr. Sirico emphasized as he recalled the day he went to the courthouse with Lai’s family. 

“The security surrounding the courthouse — barricades, machine gun–toting police, auxiliary troops under tents — felt like theater, as if Lai, a diabetic septuagenarian, posed a physical threat,” Fr. Sirico wrote. “The display aimed to intimidate. Yet Lai, who could have fled Hong Kong anytime with his British passport and wealth, deliberately stayed to confront the authoritarianism engulfing the city that, in his words, ‘gave me freedom.’”

“Sitting between his wife, Teresa, and Hong Kong’s heroic bishop emeritus Cardinal Joseph Zen, I watched Lai in his glass enclosure, his eyes meeting mine,” he continued. “He was frail from more than 1,600 days in solitary confinement. He bowed in my direction. I traced the sign of the cross in his. Tears welled in his eyes and mine. Teresa gripped her rosary, a silent defiance amid the courtroom’s sterile hum.”

Lai converted to Catholicism in 1997, the same year that Hong Kong began to have its Christian heritage taken from it, Fr. Sirico wrote, continuing: “His profound faith has been the lifeblood of his activism, sustaining his defiance and dignity through the unthinkable.”

Though Lai potentially faces life in prison, Fr. Sirico wrote, “my hope lies in the transcendent dignity I saw in Lai’s face, in Teresa’s quiet strength, in Cardinal Zen’s unyielding resolve.”

There are signs of increasing unrest with the oppressors, as international voices call for Lai’s release, and protests spark in China, according to Fr. Sirico. 

“As closing arguments begin, Lai’s case is a clarion call for the West, and for all who believe in truth and liberty,” he concluded. “Hong Kong’s revival depends on global solidarity, on voices demanding justice for Lai, for the dozens of other jailed activists, and for a city yearning to breathe freely. As Lai testified, the truth will prevail, even if only ‘in the kingdom of God.’

“Jimmy Lai reminds us what it looks like to live without fear. To speak without permission. To suffer for the truth. He reminds us, in other words, of what it means to be free.”

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