Pope Francis Wishes Organizers of Beijing Olympics ‘Every Success’

Pope Francis applauds during a global live video conference with students and computer sci
ANDREAS SOLARO/POOL/AFP via Getty
Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

ROME — Pope Francis gave a shout-out to the Beijing Winter Olympics Wednesday, wishing the organizers of the controversial event “every success.”

“The Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games are about to open in Beijing, on 4 February and 4 March respectively,” the pope said following his weekly General Audience in the Vatican. “I warmly greet all participants. I wish the organizers every success and the athletes the very best.”

“Sport, with its universal language, can build bridges of friendship and solidarity between individuals and peoples of all cultures and religions,” he asserted.

Human rights activists have urged a boycott of the 2022 Olympics, dubbing the event the “Genocide Games” for the ongoing and systematic human rights violations of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers partnered with the Committee on the Present Danger: China in drafting an open letter to the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) in 2021, with a copy to the International Olympics Committee (IOC), protesting the choice of venue for the games.

The president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, Reggie Littlejohn, told Breitbart News that along with the ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been responsible for numerous “other human rights atrocities, such as religious persecution, forced abortion and sterilization, forced organ harvesting, forced labor, and mass surveillance.”

The CCP has also engaged in “detention of dissidents and whistleblowers, unrivalled environmental predation, and the unleashing of the coronavirus pandemic on the world,” Littlejohn said, making it one of the world’s most egregious human rights abusers.

In the letter, the authors reminded the USOC and the IOC of their “charter commitments and international obligations pertaining to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment for Genocide.”

Meanwhile, the East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE), which represents the majority-Uyghur population of the occupied region in China, has called for a spectator boycott of the games in solidarity with the victims of CCP genocide.

Various national governments, including that of the United States, have formally accused China of genocide against the Uyghur people.

Pope Francis has been roundly censured for his refusal to lift his moral voice to denounce the atrocities perpetrated by the CCP against the Uyghurs.

Francis has made a point of calling out injustices and rights violations around the world but in his assumed role as global human rights sentinel he has always sidestepped China, with whom he has anxiously sought the establishment of diplomatic ties.

In a rare departure from the China policy marked by the Vatican, the U.S. Bishops published a searing communiqué in 2020 calling out the CCP for its flagrant violations of religious liberty.

“Under the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese citizens have limited religious freedom,” the bishops noted. “Since 2013, religious persecution has intensified under a government campaign for the ‘sinicization’ of religion — an effort to have religions conform to government-sanctioned interpretations of Chinese culture.”

Despite the Vatican’s provisional agreement with China on the issue of episcopal appointments, “reports of persecution by the Chinese government persist as underground churches are closed and their priests detained, crosses destroyed, bibles confiscated, and children under 18 forbidden from attending Mass and receiving religious instruction,” the bishops said.

Moreover, “Muslims have suffered grievous human rights abuses,” the bishops wrote. “Since 2017, 800,000 to possibly two million ethnic Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Hui Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in mass internment camps.”

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