(LifeSiteNews) — The daughter of pro-democracy activist, businessman, former newspaper owner, and Catholic convert Jimmy Lai has spoken out for the first time since her father’s incarceration five years ago as his trial under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law (NSL) continues to plod along.  In an EWTN video interview and in a Washington Post Op-Ed, Clarie Lai says that her father, who just turned 78 years old, is languishing in prison, “shrinking to nothing. If China fails to act, he’ll be a martyr.” “My father is suffering from rapidly deteriorating health,” Claire wrote in the Post. “He has diabetes and hypertension, his hearing and vision are failing, he has suffered from months-long infections and is in constant pain that sometimes leaves him struggling even to stand up. But the most visible and alarming sign of his plight is severe weight loss.” “His decline has become a constant concern for our family,” Lai’s daughter said. “We know little of the medical care he might receive, because no outside physician has been allowed to examine him.”   Lai said that her father is kept in a cell “without direct access to sunlight or fresh air. My heart breaks thinking of his enduring five sweltering Hong Kong summers in a tiny, airless concrete box with a bed as tough as a wooden plank.” “In summer, the heat can get up to … 111 degrees Fahrenheit,” she recounted. “To say that it’s sweltering is a massive understatement.” “He gets heat rushes all over his body, and they last until the middle of autumn. It is outrageous, and it is torturous,” she declared. Torture extends to the realm of the spiritual in that Lai has been starved of the Eucharist and deprived of his Rosary.  “He’s been denied holy Communion for over two years and got it only very, very intermittently this year,” she told EWTN News president and COO Montse Alvarado. “It’s something that costs them nothing … for him to get. It costs them nothing for him to get the rosary, and it costs them nothing to turn on the light so that he can read the Gospel.” “People often ask how he is coping,” Claire noted. “His religious faith sustains him. He says God is with him at every step, prayer brings him joy, and the prayers of others bring him a lightness of being. The first thing he asked me to bring him after he was arrested was the Bible he kept on his nightstand at home.” “I think there isn’t anything quite as much as suffering that opens your heart to God’s love. We are so grateful that Our Lord has accompanied my father. He wakes up around midnight every night to pray,” Claire told EWTN. “Before the crack of dawn, he would read the Gospel,” Lai said. “At first, he would ask the guards if they could turn on the light so that he could read … For about the first six months, they said ‘yes.’ Afterwards, they always said ‘no.’” “He is innocent of any crime,” Claire declared. “But even though the Chinese government disagrees, I believe that setting him free would be to the government’s advantage. He has suffered enough, and unless something changes, he is very likely to become a martyr for freedom.” Lai’s father, Jimmy — a British national — was sentenced to a six-year jail term in December 2022 on the charge of “fraud.” According to news outlet Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP), at Lai’s 2022 sentencing, the judge also imposed “an eight-year disqualification order to Lai and ordered the media tycoon to pay HK$2 million in fines.” The businessman was brought into the Catholic faith by fellow Hong Kong resident Cardinal Joseph Zen and has been a strong and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its measures against freedom. He founded the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily in 1995, which published criticism of the CCP that earned it the ire of the communist authorities. The newspaper became one of the leading outlets in Hong Kong before its forced closure by the authorities. “As Our Lady has taught us, there is nothing that conquers doubt and fear except for the love of God. And that was a time when he was ready to receive it,” Claire noted. “My father converted one year after I was born. Really, the only memories I have are of growing up in a very loving Catholic family.” 

(LifeSiteNews) — A leader in the Marxist, anti-family Black Lives Matter movement is facing dozens of federal criminal charges. “A federal grand jury indicted the leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in Oklahoma City over allegations that millions of dollars in grant funds were improperly spent on international trips, groceries and personal real estate,” the Associated Press (AP) reported Thursday. “Tashella Sheri Amore Dickerson, 52, was indicted earlier this month on 20 counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering,” the AP reported. Dickerson reportedly took money raised through the Oklahoma BLM organization and used it for her own personal benefit. The group raised millions of dollars since 2020 on the back of controversy over the killing of George Floyd, supposedly to use to bail accused criminals out of prison. Instead, “Dickerson embezzled at least $3.15 million into her personal accounts and then used the money to pay for trips to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, (and) retail shopping,” prosecutors allege. She also spent “at least $50,000 in food and grocery deliveries for herself and her children, a personal vehicle, and six properties in Oklahoma City deeded to her or to a company she controlled.” She is not the only BLM leader to face accusations of using the movement for her own gain (despite the Marxist roots of Black Lives Matter). The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation also took advantage of donor largesse several years ago. The organization, one of several nonprofits using the BLM name, “bought a $6 million home with donation funds,” according to previously reporting by the Columbia University journalism School and National Public Radio (NPR). Journalism professor and reporter Sean Campbell said the nonprofit “justified the purchase as a space where Black creatives could come and create their art and influence things for the movement.” “They also, in a memo that I obtained later, wanted to use the home as a safe house when people were feeling threatened or receiving death threats, other things,” Campbell told NPR in 2022. Leader Patrisse Cullors “acknowledged she had used the BLM property twice for personal purposes,” the AP reported. She has defended the purchase, saying he group grew too quickly and made mistakes. “We really wanted to make sure that the global network foundation had an asset that wasn’t just financial resources,” Cullors previously said. The revelations that BLM used money to buy fancy homes led conservative commentator Michael Knowles to create a backronym for the group. BLM stands for “Buy Large Mansions,” Knowles has quipped.

(LifeSiteNews) — There comes to us today the fourth of our wise virgins, the valiant martyr Lucy. Her glorious name shines on the sacred Dyptich of the Canon of the Mass together with those of Agatha, Agnes, and Cecilia; and as often as we hear it pronounced during these days of Advent, it reminds us (for Lucy signifies Light) that He who consoles the Church, by enlightening her children, is soon to be with us. Lucy is one of the three glories of the Church of Sicily; as Catania is immortalized by Agatha, and Palermo by Rosaly, so is Syracuse by Lucy. Therefore, let us devoutly keep her feast: she will aid us by her prayers during this holy season, and will repay our love by obtaining for us a warmer love of that Jesus whose grace enabled her to conquer the world. Once more let us consider why Our Lord has not only given us apostles, martyrs, and bishops as guides to us on our road to Bethlehem, but has willed also that we should be accompanied thither by such virgins as Lucy. The children of the Church are forcibly reminded by this, that in approaching the crib of their Sovereign Lord and God, they must bring with them, besides their faith, that purity of mind and body without which no one can come near to God. Let us now read the glorious acts of the virgin Lucy. Lucy, a virgin of Syracuse, illustrious by birth and by the Christian faith, which she had professed from her infancy, went to Catania, with her mother Eutychia, who was suffering from a flux of blood, there to venerate the body of the blessed Agatha. Having prayed fervently at the tomb, she obtained her mother’s cure by the intercession of Agatha. Lucy then asked her mother that she would permit her to bestow upon the poor of Christ the fortune which she intended to leave her. No sooner, therefore, had she returned to Syracuse, than she sold all that was given to her, and distributed the money amongst the poor. When he to whom her parents had, against her will, promised her in marriage, came to know what Lucy had done, he went before the prefect in Paschasius, and accused her of being a Christian. Paschasius entreated and threatened, but could not induce her to worship the idols; nay, the more he strove to shake her faith, the more inflamed were the praises which she uttered in professing its excellence. He said, therefore, to her: ‘We shall have no more of thy words, when thou feelest the blows of my executioners.’ To this the virgin replied: ‘Words can never be wanting to God’s servants, for Christ Our Lord has said to them: When you shall be brought before kings and governors, take no thought how or what to speak; for it shall be given to you in that hour what to speak; for it is not you that speak, but the Holy Spirit that speaketh in you.’ Paschasius then asked her: ‘Is the Holy Spirit in thee?’ She answered: ‘They who live chastely and piously, are the temple of the Holy Spirit.’ He said: ‘I will order thee to be taken to a brothel, that this Holy Spirit may leave thee.’ The virgin said to him: ‘The violence wherewith thou threatenest me would obtain for me a double crown of chastity.’ Whereupon Paschasius, being exceeding angry, ordered Lucy to be dragged to a place where her treasure might be violated; but, by the power of God, so firmly was she fixed to the place where she stood, that it was impossible to move her. Wherefore the prefect ordered her to be covered over with pitch, resin, and boiling oil, and a fire to be kindled round her. But seeing that the flame was not permitted to hurt her, they tormented her in many cruel ways, and at length ran a sword through her neck. Thus wounded, Lucy foretold the peace of the Church, which would come after the deaths of Dioclesian and Maximian, and then died. It was the Ides of December (December 13). Her body was buried at Syracuse, but was translated thence first to Constantinople, and afterwards to Venice. We here give some of the Antiphons which occur in the Office of the saint: they form a lyric poem of great beauty. As Lucy was praying, there appeared unto her the blessed Agatha, and she comforted the handmaid of Christ. O virgin Lucy! Why askest thou of me, what thyself canst straightaways grant unto thy mother? Because of thee, O virgin Lucy! the city of Syracuse shall be honored by the Lord Jesus Christ. Words of Lucy: I bless thee, the Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, because by thy Son the fire was quenched that was around me. In thy patience thou didst possess thy soul, O Lucy, Spouse of Christ! Thou didst hate the things that are in the world, and thou shinest among the angels. Thou didst conquer the enemy by thine own blood. We present ourselves before thee, O virgin martyr, beseeching thee to obtain for us that we may recognize in His lowliness that same Jesus whom thou now seest in His glory. Take us under thy powerful patronage. Thy name signifies light; guide us through the dark night of this life. O fair Light of Virginity! enlighten us; evil concupiscence has wounded our eyes: pray for us, O thou bright Light of Virginity! that our blindness be healed, and that rising above created things, we may be able to see that true Light, which shineth in darkness, but which darkness cannot comprehend. Pray for us, that our eye may be purified, and may see, in the child who is to be born at Bethlehem, the new man, the second Adam, the model on which the life of our regeneration must be formed. Pray, too, O holy virgin, for the Church of Rome and for all those which adopt her form of the Holy Sacrifice; for they daily pronounce at the altar of God thy sweet name, and the Lamb, who is present, loves to hear it. Heap thy choicest blessings on the fair isle, which was thy native land, and where grew the palm of thy martyrdom. May thy intercession secure to her inhabitants firmness of faith, purity of morals, and temporal prosperity, and deliver them from the disorders which threaten her with destruction. This text is taken from The Liturgical Year, authored by Dom Prosper Guéranger (1841-1875). LifeSiteNews is grateful to The Ecu-Men website for making this classic work easily available online.