George Weigel, National Catholic Register
Thursday, January 15, 2026
In a 1974 address to a group of lay Catholics, St. 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.” 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.
