His daughter’s cancer diagnosis only makes his immediate release all the more urgent.
His daughter’s cancer diagnosis only makes his immediate release all the more urgent.
‘I t’s hard to bear yourself at the foot of the cross. And it’s hard to recognize your own shortcomings, but it’s also the only thing that helps.”
Claire Lai had been reading Fulton J. Sheen, archbishop and trailblazing American TV host, who is advancing on the road to sainthood. She brought up the scriptural image and quote from Sheen in an interview earlier this year about her own saint, her father, Jimmy Lai. He has been living his own hell — away from his family, the sacraments of his beloved Catholic Church, and the freedom he fought for for himself and others as a newspaper editor and entrepreneur. He’s a political prisoner — mostly in solitary confinement — in Hong Kong, incarcerated on trumped-up charges under a bogus national-security law which pretty much exists to silence — and make an example of — him.
And now his daughter has been diagnosed with cancer — and with it her plea for her father’s release has only intensified. Not only is he her father, but he is an incredible font of wisdom and sanctity living among us today.
Claire recently shared advice her father gave her in a letter shortly before she was diagnosed: “Hold on to hope and don’t be impatient. You have to know and trust that God’s way is not your way. His way is ineffable to us. That’s why he is God. Remember with humility what St. Augustine said, ‘If you comprehend, He is not God.’”
While in many ways Jimmy Lai, a Catholic convert, is living out the Christian call to holiness, his is a remarkable — heroic — witness. As Claire has described, “The conditions of my father’s imprisonment in solitary confinement are clearly designed to crush his spirit.” Communism wants you to buckle and renounce God and see no authority but the state. And they hate God, so they hate everything about the pure love between a father and daughter, buttressed by faith during these increasingly painful years of testing.
“The humid Hong Kong summers are the harshest,” Claire writes about her father’s confinement. “Summer 2026 was particularly volatile, with both heatwaves and thunderstorms that left the prison floors damp. The windows in his cell are covered over, blocking access to fresh air and natural light.”
Locked away for six years and counting, his conditions decline, as does his health. But the man, despite his age (78) and ailments, is an icon of resilience. “He has seldom been overwhelmed — by anything,” Claire writes. “But when he was told recently that I have cancer, he broke down.” He, of course, wants to take care of “his baby girl,” as Claire relays it. “His warm embrace when I was injured was one thing I could always count on growing up.
She wants him by her side. She also knows the enemy. And she wants her father to know he has prepared her. “In the letter I wrote to him afterward,” she explains, “I told him what I’ve long known in the depths of my heart: Although I deeply wish he were with me now, he has already shown me how to bear it. In watching him shoulder all his hardships as . . . a surrender to God’s will — he has taught me how to face my own trial. He has never stopped protecting me.”
She had previously written, candidly: “Humility is not a virtue my father was previously known for.” That’s important to know — the fact makes his remarkable faith less exotic to the rest of us not exactly pining for persecution.
“God alone is sufficient,” he’s written to her, “He will care for you, indeed He does if you believe with absolute trust. . . . When we have no need of anything, we find that we have everything in God’s care and mercy.”
Within a month of his imprisonment, Jimmy Lai committed to fasting on Fridays. When the weather is cold, it makes him shiver — he’s lost so much weight while there. Claire was/is worried about the fasting, but his reasoning is difficult to argue with. The guards would set a tray of food before him anyway, and he has admitted he has considered breaking the fast. “I was tempted, of course, but I did not yield,” she quotes him explaining. But then he “looked at the picture of Christ on the Cross I put on the wall” — he has taken up religious art during this time of isolation. He draws Christ on the cross, often with Mary. He’s also worked on the image of the Pietà — Mary holding her crucified Son in her arms. While gazing on His Savior on his instrument of execution, he wrote: “I realized how trivial my shivering was compared to what the Lord suffered for our sins.”
Having learned from her father, Claire writes: “My father bears all his ills patiently and joyfully, recognizing the graces they bring. Over the last six years, he has offered up his physical and emotional ailments in union with our Lord. Knowing that, when united with Christ’s suffering, it carries redemption and divine grace. This is a profound mystery.”
Strikingly, she adds: “I hope to bear my much smaller cross half as well as he has. That this will unite me more deeply with both Christ and my earthly father. Taken this way, it’s hard to see my diagnosis as anything but a blessing.”
God love these beautiful, courageous people, to borrow a phrase from Fulton Sheen’s famous “Life is Worth Living” sign-off. We may not be worthy of them, but they show us how to imitate the goodness of our Creator. This is the Christian life. Thanks be to God for this family.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.