In a new book, Pope Francis for the first time calls China’s Muslim Uyghurs a “persecuted” people, something human rights activists have been urging him to do for years.
In the wide-ranging “Let Us Dream: The Path to A Better Future,” Pope Francis also says the COVID-19 pandemic should spur governments to consider permanently establishing a universal basic income.
In the book, a 150-page collaboration with his English-language biographer, Austen Ivereigh, Pope Francis speaks of economic, social and political changes he says are needed to address inequalities after the pandemic ends. It goes on sale on Dec. 1.
He also says people who see wearing masks as an imposition by the state are “victims only in their imagination” and praises those who protested against the death of George Floyd in police custody for rallying around the “healthy indignation” that united them.
“I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uyghurs, the Yazidi,” he said in a section where he also talks about persecuted Christians in Islamic countries.
While the pope has spoken out before about the Rohingya who have fled Myanmar, and the killing of Yazidi by Islamic State in Iraq, it was the first time he mentioned the Uyghurs.
Faith leaders, activist groups and governments have said crimes against humanity and genocide are taking place against Uyghurs in China’s remote Xinjiang region, where more than 1 million people are held in camps.
Last month, during a conference at the Vatican, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blasted China over its treatment of Uyghurs.
Beijing has rejected the allegations as an attempt to discredit China, saying the camps are vocational education and training centers as part of counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures.
Many commentators have said the Vatican was reluctant to speak out on the Uyghurs earlier because it was in the process of renewing a controversial accord with Beijing on the appointment of bishops. The accord, which Pompeo urged the Vatican to abandon, was renewed in September.
Pope Francis also gives his clearest support to date in the book to universal basic income, a controversial policy espoused by some economists and sociologists in which governments give a fixed amount of money to each citizen with no conditions attached.
Pope Francis again criticized trickle-down economics, the theory favored by conservatives that tax breaks and other incentives for big business and the wealthy eventually will benefit the rest of society through investment and job creation.
He called it “the false assumption of the infamous trickle-down theory that a growing economy will make us all richer.”
