"It's hard to bear yourself at the foot of the cross. And it's hard to recognize your own shortcomings, but it's also the only thing that helps."

Claire Lai had been reading Fulton J. Sheen, the archbishop and trailblazing American TV host who is advancing on the road to sainthood in the Catholic Church this week with a beatification Mass at the Dome at America's Center in downtown St. Louis. Sheen was meditating on "the Blessed Mother, Mary Magdalene, and St. John, the most beloved disciple, at the foot of the cross" of Jesus. She brought up the Scriptural image and quote from Sheen in an interview earlier this year about her father, Jimmy Lai. He has been living his own hell — away from his family, the sacraments of his beloved Catholic Church and the freedom he fought for as a newspaper editor and entrepreneur. He's a political prisoner — mostly in solitary confinement — in Hong Kong, incarcerated under trumped-up charges under a bogus national-security law that pretty much exists to silence — and make an example of — him.

And now his daughter has been diagnosed with cancer — and with it........

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