Canceled in China

Hallow, the prayer app that debuted in 2018, is one of the most popular spiritual tools on the planet, having been downloaded some 14 million times in over 150 countries, according to founder Alex Jones. 

So I was delighted when Hallow approached me several months ago, seeking to use material from Witness to Hope, the first volume of my biography of Pope St. John Paul II, in a series of meditations and prayers that would be launched this summer. I prepared a phonetic pronunciation guide for Jim Caviezel, who would read texts from the book, and I was pleased that the meditations would be led by my friend Msgr. James Shea, president of the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. Everything seemed in order. 

Then, in mid-July, shortly after the John Paul II/Witness to Hope series went live, Alex Jones was abruptly informed that the Hallow app had been removed from the Apple App Store in China because the communist government, through its Cyberspace Administration, had determined that the series included “illegal” content. Hallow was canceled in China. 

What was the illegal content that led the Cyberspace Administration of China to issue this abrupt, irreversible diktat? Descriptions of John Paul II’s role in the collapse of European communism? John Paul’s luminous witness to Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life—including every Chinese life? 

To grasp the full absurdity of all this, consider the Chinese communist regime’s record since it came to power in 1949.

Chinese Catholics and Catholic missionaries, including that brave (and shamefully un-beatified) Maryknoller, Brooklyn-born Bishop Francis Ford, have been martyred in droves. In the 1958–1962 “Great Leap Forward,” 45 million Chinese died, some 30 million from starvation. Another 1.6 million died in the 1966–1976 “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” and millions more were so traumatized by public shaming and re-education camps that their lives were ruined. In the spring of 1989, as many as ten thousand Chinese were killed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

China’s draconian “one-child policy” led to a genocide of unborn baby girls, untold numbers of coerced abortions—and doubtless millions more, as women tried to hide their unapproved pregnancies from governmental ferrets. The Chinese regime is reliably reported to harvest organs from condemned Falun Gong devotees. China’s government has conducted a decades-long campaign to destroy traditional Tibetan culture and now herds hundreds of thousands of its non-ethnic-Chinese citizens into concentration camps for “re-education through labor.” China’s people today are the most heavily surveilled population in history, with both educational and career opportunities dependent on acquiescence to the regime. 

China has broken every guarantee it made about preserving civil liberties in Hong Kong when that city reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997; the puppet government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region jails anyone who dares call out that betrayal, including white martyrs like media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai. China regularly conducts provocative military operations in the South China Sea, threatens neighbors like Vietnam and the Philippines, and spreads vast amounts of investment cash around the world as it seeks to create a global network of political influencers through its Belt and Road Initiative.

A regime capable of all that is afraid of a prayer app? And a Polish priest now dead for almost twenty years? 

China, which looks so formidable at first or second glance, is in fact weakening. The one-child policy has led to a demographic meltdown that will have severe consequences economically, blight the lives of men who cannot find wives, and immiserate the elderly who will be bereft of family support or a proper social safety net. The regime’s ever more intrusive social controls bespeak fear of the Chinese people, not confidence in their enthusiasm for the social model promoted by Communist party boss Xi Jinping. The politically and economically vibrant democracy across the Taiwan Strait is a standing reproach to the claim that the Chinese can only be ruled autocratically. And despite repression and persecution, Chinese Christianity continues to grow, even as the regime tightens its grip on formally approved religious communities. With or without Hallow, prayers will continue to be addressed from China to the Throne of Grace, which, history teaches, is far more powerful than either the Dragon Throne of the old Chinese emperors or the throne of Emperor Xi.

The Chinese people are the heirs of a great civilization. I only wish that the Chinese regime had as much confidence as I do in its people’s capacity for living nobly and productively as free men and women: a confidence shared by the canceled John Paul II.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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Photo by Butmiyuenan 2, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.