Cardinal Joseph Zen is stand trial tomorrow in Hong Kong, on bogus charges trumped up by feral Communist thugs.
As a trustee of pro Democracy group 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, Zen is facing bogus charges of having been an accomplice to anti Communist demonstrations in Hong Kong, in which the organisation had been implicated after paying legal fees of protestors.
The 90 year old Cardinal was arrested last week and now must stand before a show trial organised by the demonically anti Catholic Chinese Communist Party. Xi Jinping, China’s Communist dictator, is known to despite not just the faith as a whole but Zen in particular.
The situation for Chinese Catholics has grown ever bleaker in recent years, even with the Vatican’s efforts to reach a settlement with Beijing only seeming to slow the onslaught, rather than stopping it altogether. Churches are still being torn down, Christians are still in hiding and as we now know, even Cardinals are not immune from persecution.
Politicians around the world are noticeably silent on the matter, particularly Irish politicians who have historically had a cozy relationship with the Chinese Communist Party for the past decade. The cozy relationship bizarrely coincided with Ireland’s closure of the Vatican Embassy.
The state approved church of China, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, was founded in 1957 as an ape of the true church, one that could be controlled by Beijing without the interference of Rome. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of real Catholics went to their death or to decades of suffering for staying true to Rome. One such individual was Ignatius Kung, who spent decades in a prison cell under Communist oppression, being made a Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in the process. Another was Aedan McGrath, the Irish priest and Legion of Mary member jailed for two years by the Communists in the 1950s, who later wrote of his ordeal under the Maoists. McGrath was brutally tortured both physically and mentally yet kept his faith and stayed strong.
There is no reason not to fear the worst for Cardinal Zen, he must be given our prayers and support.
People should lobby their politicians to speak up, but in the knowledge that the bravado that they reserve for the Catholic Church and for pro family countries like Poland and Hungary will be noticeably absent when it comes to confronting China. The cowardice of Simon Coveney, Enda Kenny, Michael D Higgins and Leo Varadkar when faced with a genuine degenerate dictator shows the true colours of the West’s moral decline and vacuous and illusory nature of its supposed strength and commitment to the ‘right side of history’.
The continuing persecution of Cardinal Zen and the underground church appears to be less appealing to the media and politicians than the Uighur persecutions by China, which is why Catholics must raise their voices and speak up for those suffering for their faith as ancestors once did in Ireland and elsewhere.
For what it is worth, Zen expressed his bravery in a 2020 tweet when the so called ‘National Security Law’ was introduced in order to persecute men like him.