A leading expert in Chinese affairs has called upon the Vatican to speak out against China’s state-sanctioned organ harvesting industry where prisoners of conscience are allegedly being killed on demand.
Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, told Catholic media LifeSiteNews said it was time the Vatican joined a growing chorus of voices condemning organ harvesting in China.
“It would be very helpful if the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, headed by Archbishop Marcello Sorondo, would actually speak out against the continuing practice of organ harvesting in China from people who are executed for their organs,” Mosher said.
He told LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief John-Henry that collected evidence showing what was occurring in China was “not a pretty picture.”
“This is a question of literally killing people for their organs to make a profit off them,” Mosher said.
“The United States — in its human rights report just published last month — referred to the problem of the execution of prisoners for their organs and has asked for it to be looked into as a real human rights violation. So, I think that a lot of people are speaking with the same voice on this and it would be helpful if Archbishop Sorondo added his voice to the people who are demanding China end this horrible human rights abuse,” he said.
Mosher was attending a May 20-21 conference at the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family in Rome. He said he hoped to visit Archbishop Sorondo while he was in the Italian capital and that he had already sent the Argentinean archbishop new data revealing that the Chinese government’s transplant figures are fabricated.
Archbishop Sorondo has earned infamy in the past for praising communist-run China while belittling the U.S. Father Bernardo Cervellera, head of the AsiaNews agency, said in an editorial that the archbishop’s views on China made the church a laughing stock.
Archbishop Sorondo also made headlines for inviting Chinese officials believed to be involved in organ harvesting to Vatican events held by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences while his visit to an organ trafficking conference in China in August 2017 was seen as propaganda fodder for China’s state-run press.
Another religious publication, the Catholic Herald reported that they saw a letter written by the archbishop where he said that the Chinese government has “accomplished the reform of the organ donation system.”
In his interview with LifeSiteNews, Mosher stated that in the West anyone needing a transplant would wait for a long time for a tissue match.
But in China, he said, if you were seeking an organ for transplant you will “generally within the week and sometimes as soon as 24-48 hours you [will] have the heart the kidney the liver that you’ve been waiting for.”
Mosher pointed out — as have many others concerned by this practice — that this can only be done if there is a large pool of living ‘donors’ to use.
“The only way that can happen is by having a million people on death row in China who’ve already been tissue typed,” Mosher said. “They put the tissue of the prospective buyer of the organ into the computer and when a match comes up that person is executed, and their organs are taken out and immediately transplanted into the buyer.”
He pointed out that now people killed for their organs in China are no longer executed by being shot and then having their organs removed but that people are paralyzed and then killed as their organs are being extracted.
“This is big business,” he said. “It’s business that Communist Party officials are probably profiting by, and it’s a business that they’re unlikely to want to give up unless there’s tremendous international pressure.”
Mosher said he was first aware of the issue of organ harvesting in China during the early 1990s. He said organ harvesting later increased when the Chinese government began persecuting Falun Gong practitioners who researchers say are the main people targeted to be killed for their organs.
See a China Uncensored video about organ harvesting in China:
In 2006 allegations were made that large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners were being killed for their organs at a hospital in northern China and credible reports followed.
The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China released a 700-page report in mid-2016, that demonstrated the extent of forced organ harvesting in China. The report estimated that 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants are performed annually in China.
Among the evidence used to calculate these figures was data from hospital revenues, transplantation volumes, bed utilization rates, surgical personnel, training programs, and state funding.
The report was written by Canadian researchers former MP David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas, and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann.
They concluded the source for these organs was prisoners of conscience, mostly Falun Gong practitioners who have been persecuted by the state since 1999. Other prisoners of conscience — Tibetans, Uyghurs, and House Christians — have also been targeted by the communists as a source of bodily organs, only to a lesser extent, the report said.
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