ROME — Hong Kong police arrested 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen on Wednesday evening, then released him on bail hours later.
As one of the trustees of a fund that helped finance demonstrators arrested during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, the cardinal was detained Wednesday for conspiring to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security, according to a police statement.
While released on bail, Zen’s travel documents would be confiscated, police added.
In July 2020, the cardinal — the former bishop of Hong Kong — said he was prepared to suffer arrest and trials under Hong Kong’s restrictive National Security Law.
“If right and proper words were considered against their law, I will endure all the suing, trials, and arrests. Numerous predecessors have endured similarly,” Zen said in a video posted on Facebook.
The White House responded to news of the cardinal’s arrest by calling on Chinese and Hong Kong authorities to “cease targeting Hong Kong’s advocates,” while expressly calling for Zen’s immediate release, saying he had been “unjustly detained and charged.”
Cardinal Joseph Zen attends the Episcopal Ordination of the Most Reverend Stephen Chow in Hong Kong’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on December 4, 2021. ( BERTHA WANG/AFP via Getty)
Papal spokesman Matteo Bruni said Wednesday evening that the Vatican was deeply concerned over the news of the arrest and was “following the development of the situation with extreme attention.”
Zen has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as well of the Vatican’s deal with Beijing over the naming of Catholic bishops in the country, which he labelled “the sell-out of our Church.”
While the Vatican seeks compromise with the CCP, they want “complete surrender,” he said.
Zen has also insisted that Pope Francis is “naïve” in dealing with a country about which he knows little.
“The pope doesn’t know much about China. And he may have some sympathy for the Communists, because in South America, the Communists are good guys, they suffer for social justice,” Zen said. “But not the [Chinese] Communists. They are persecutors.”
“So the situation is, humanly speaking, hopeless for the Catholic Church: Because we can always expect the Communists to persecute the Church, but now [faithful Catholics] don’t get any help from the Vatican,” he said.
“The Vatican is helping the government, surrendering, giving everything into their hands,” Zen said.
In 2019, Zen said that the pope’s policies in dealing with the CCP are “killing” the underground Church in that country.
Cardinal Joseph Zen (C) arrives at the Wanchai district court in Hong Kong on December 9, 2021, where jailed media mogul Jimmy Lai was among three democracy campaigners convicted for taking part in a banned Tiananmen vigil as the prosecution of multiple activists came to a conclusion. (BERTHA WANG/AFP via Getty)
“Unfortunately, my experience of my contact with the Vatican is simply disastrous,” the cardinal said, noting his particular distress over the Vatican’s deal with Beijing.
“A secret agreement, being so secret you can’t say anything,” Zen said. “We don’t know what is in it. Then the legitimization of the seven excommunicated bishops. That’s incredible, simply incredible.”
“But even more incredible is the last act: the killing of the underground,” he said.