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In April Jamie Powell entered the hospital room in Changsha with her eldest son and his fiancée to find her husband John Sanqiang Cao reduced by late-stage cancer, the Chinese Communist Party having kept them apart for nine years. The regime that once imprisoned the pastor for carrying Bibles now withholds the exit visa that would let a dying man return to his wife and children in the United States.
The same power that closed churches and seized foreign clergy now practices a refined cruelty: it permits the family a single visit while the husband remains trapped inside its borders. This is the work of the Dispossessor, the state that treats the household as an obstacle to its total claim upon the person.
From the earliest centuries the Church has taught that the family is the first society ordained by God, a covenantal unit no earthly authority may lawfully dissolve. The Nicene Fathers and the later Reformers alike confessed that civil rulers exist to protect, not to sever, the bonds of kinship and the duties of fatherhood.
Augustine saw the earthly city always at war with the City of God precisely because the latter honors the natural order of household and nation while the former seeks to dissolve them into its own abstract power. The present case repeats that ancient contest on Chinese soil.
The regime's refusal to release a terminal patient is therefore not an administrative detail but a direct assault upon the patriarchal household and upon the liberty of the Christian to die in the company of his own. Such acts echo the exiles imposed on the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when families were deliberately scattered by the state.
The governing principle remains unchanged: no government possesses authority to annul the duties a man owes his wife and sons. When rulers claim that authority they cease to be legitimate and become instruments of the city of man set against the divine order.
The faithful remnant must therefore treat this detention as an act of war upon the household and demand the pastor's immediate release through every lawful channel open to them. They must also prepare parallel structures of advocacy and refuge so that future victims of the same regime find a Church that still remembers its duty to the captive.
History records that regimes which war against the family eventually fall; the duty of the present generation is to ensure that the cost of such warfare is made plain before that fall occurs.
