Published April 16, 2025
Last Christmas, I borrowed a thought from the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander and suggested in this space that the wood of the manger anticipates the wood of the Cross: that Christmas points to Easter, but only by traversing the Via Crucis to Calvary. And I mentioned two contemporary Catholic martyr-confessors—Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, patriarch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and Jimmy Lai, Catholicism’s premier prisoner of conscience, unjustly incarcerated for a thousand-plus days in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison—as heroic witnesses to the design of salvation history. As the Church has passed beyond Christmastide and the first weeks of Ordinary Time into the Lenten itinerary of conversion, these two men have been called to even greater suffering—and have given an ever more noble witness.
I had the honor of hosting Major Archbishop Shevchuk for a discussion at the Ethics and Public Policy Center during his mid-February visit to Washington. There, I told the other guests that, when I first met the major archbishop shortly after his election in 2011 and shared with him a disturbing memo about an aggressively anti-Ukrainian Russian Orthodox leader with whom I had recently spoken, I was struck by his exceptional calm: the calm that comes from a rich interior life nourished by prayer and the sacraments. As it happened, my patriarchal friend had to draw on every spiritual resource available to get through the rest of his Washington visit.
Denied a meeting with any administration official of consequence, he was shunted off to the head of the White House “Faith Office,” Pastor Paula White, whose knowledge of Ukraine’s battle for survival is not, shall we say, comprehensive, and whose office has nothing to do with foreign policy. He then had to watch senior American officials misrepresent the aggressor in the war that has devastated his country, denounce his president as a dictator, and falsely accuse Ukraine of ingratitude for American aid. Meanwhile, as the U.S. put relentless pressure on the Ukrainian government, Russian assaults on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure intensified, and nary an American word was said in condemnation of what breaks every Ukrainian’s heart: the vile kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children, currently being “re-educated” in Russia.
Yet Major Archbishop Shevchuk remained calm and determined along this Via Crucis, and in addresses to overflow audiences in Washington and Toronto, called his people, and all people of good will, to exercise Christian hope while confronting evil with truth.
Jimmy Lai’s Via Crucis has also gotten steeper since Christmas.
Meeting his son, Sebastien, and Lai’s international legal team at Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s New York residence, I learned that the show trial in which Jimmy is charged with violating Hong Kong’s draconian “national security law” will likely drag on into 2026. When he’s taken from his windowless, solitary confinement cell to this obscene parody of a legal process, Jimmy is berated by judges from the bench in an obvious attempt to break him, and to intimidate any Hong Konger who might be tempted to follow his example of steadfastness in defense of basic human rights. One is reminded of Orwell’s description of totalitarianism in 1984: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
But Jimmy Lai perseveres in his witness, even as his jailers now deny him the comfort of Holy Communion, which he used to receive when Cardinal Joseph Zen visited him in jail. The ninety-three-year-old cardinal is now confined to a wheelchair, however; he can’t get to Stanley Prison; and the wannabe Stalinists running Hong Kong have refused permission for another priest to bring the Sacrament to Jimmy.
About which, and indeed about this entire slow-motion martyrdom, the Vatican has never uttered a syllable of protest. Nor have the Church’s leaders offered even a private word of support to Jimmy Lai and his family. Yet Jimmy remains as unshakable in his Catholic resistance to tyranny and persecution as Thomas More did in the Tower of London centuries ago.
Many Christians now pray the Via Lucis, the Stations of the Resurrection, as an Eastertide follow-on to the Lenten Via Crucis, the Stations of the Cross. The Via Lucis completes the Church’s meditation on the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, which annually reminds us that, no matter how dark the horizon may seem, God’s purposes in history will be vindicated—and that our vocation is to bring others to know that truth.
That is what Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk and Jimmy Lai do. And that is why the Via Crucis they now tread opens, finally, into a Via Lucis: a light to help others know the Name (Acts 5:20) and find the Way (Acts 24:14).
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.
