The evangelist in Stanley Prison

In a 1974 address to a group of lay Catholics, Pope Paul VI noted that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses”—an acute observation he later reiterated in his spiritual testament, the 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (Announcing the Gospel).

That witnesses can be more persuasive than teachers has likely been the case for two millennia: Christian lives lived nobly have probably brought more men and women to Christ, or back to Christ, than syllogisms. Pope Paul’s observation is especially pertinent at this historical moment, however, when skepticism about the human ability to grasp the truth of anything is constantly under assault in our culture.

If Paul VI was right about witnesses being evangelists, then Jimmy Lai — the Hong Kong entrepreneur, newspaperman, and human rights advocate who has now spent more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement in Stanley Prison, and who was recently “convicted” in a sham “trial” of being a threat to Hong Kong’s “national security”—is one of Catholicism’s most compelling evangelists. For like other modern Catholic heroes such as Father Alfred Delp, Blessed Omelyan Kovch, Bishop Francis Ford, Sister Nijolė Sadūnaitė, and Cardinal George Pell, Jimmy Lai has turned his imprisonment into a spiritual retreat. And he has shared what the Spirit has taught him in those cruel circumstances through works of religious art sketched in colored pencil on ruled paper, as well as through his letters to his family.

One of those sketches—a portrait of Our Lady at the Annunciation bearing the simple inscription “Yes!”—was the Lai family’s 2025 Christmas card. The card also included one of Jimmy’s most moving confessions of faith. After asking himself in a letter to his wife and children, “Why is my mood not down at all, sometimes even light-hearted?” and then answering his own question—“I guess because so many people whom I have even never met are praying for me is the main reason”—this 21^st century martyr-confessor gave thanks for what his conversion to Catholicism and his current ordeal had taught him, in words reproduced on that Christmas card:

I am always in God’s presence because of [those] prayers. I am so thankful the Lord gave me a new life, a life I was [previously] blind to — a life of true peace, joy, spiritual concreteness and meaning — as opposed to my muddling in life in pursuit of purposes bound into the narrowness of my ego before. Now I am free because I can see.

Jimmy Lai would never claim to be a theologian, but he displayed here a profound grasp of what we mean by professing our belief in the “Communion of Saints” when we pray the Apostles Creed. Just as the human eye cannot see itself, human beings can be blinded to the truth about ourselves, our obligations, and our eternal destiny when we’re caught in the trap of our egos. To be liberated into human and spiritual maturity, we need others—others who can help us see ourselves clearly, thereby giving us the capacity to see the world truly.

That is what happens in the Communion of Saints. Others introduce us to Christ. Others help us to see ourselves as forgiven and redeemed, thereby helping cure us of the myopia caused by egotism. Others sustain us and help us grow by their prayers, for no authentic prayer ever goes unheard. Jimmy Lai knows that and lives it. Through the prayers that sustain him, he can “see” his suffering during almost five years of an otherwise wretched imprisonment as an occasion of grace, in which he participates in Christ’s continuing redemption of the world.

The policies of Xi Jinping, the absolute ruler of China, aim to make China the world’s preeminent power, in payback for what Mao Zedong called its “century of humiliation” at the hands of exploitative foreign powers. Greatness as measured in the immediate moment can be illusory, however. In the first half of the 16^th century, King Henry VIII bestrode England like a colossus. Yet today, it’s Thomas More—the man Henry Tudor unjustly imprisoned for refusing to bend his conscience to the autocrat’s will—who is remembered as the “man for all seasons”: the man whose example has drawn others into the Communion of Saints for over four centuries.

Those who find an analogy here with 21^st-century Catholicism’s most famous political prisoner, Jimmy Lai, will understand what Pope St. Paul VI said about witnesses being evangelists, and what that means for living the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19) today.

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