By Christopher White, The Tablet’s National Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi described repression of religious minorities in China as a “challenge to the conscience of the world” Tuesday during the opening day of a high-level U.S. summit on religious freedom.

Pelosi, a Catholic and the only woman to ever hold the post of House Speaker, said that if the United States is unwilling to call out China for its abuses of religious freedom then it loses its ability to call out other countries for similar abuses.

“Violations are of such scale and so big, and the commercial interests are so significant, that it sometimes tempers our values as to how we are to act on it,” said Pelosi, noting that many countries are unwilling to take a stand on the issue because of the potential profit to be made there.

Pelosi’s remarks came during the Second Annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom sponsored by the U.S. State Department. She was joined by former Republican Congressman Frank Wolf for a discussion moderated by Sam Brownback, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Wolf, an evangelical Christian who was the architect of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act which created the post that Brownback now holds, concurred with Pelosi, noting that over the last thirty years there has been a sharp decline in the willingness to call out China for its treatment of people of faith.

In particular, Pelosi singled out Chinese President Xi Jinping as an “authoritarian of the most oppressive nature” and condemned him for his efforts to punish people for their beliefs.

The panel gave special spotlight to the plight of the more than one million estimated Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group that has been confined to concentration camps and is the subject of torture and abuse.

Both Wolf and Pelosi recalled their various visits to China over the last three decades and praised one another for their “courage” in the fight for religious liberty, noting that despite their political differences, they have been able to work across the aisle for common cause.

Wolf also briefly discussed the issue of Christians in China, saying that the “Catholic Church has been coerced,” in an apparent nod to the recent Vatican deal with China allowing for input on the appointment of bishops in the country.

He noted that Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired archbishop of Hong Kong and fierce critic of the Vatican policy, was recently in Washington and said that the fate of religious people in China is “worse now than any time.”

Brownback did not weigh in on the discussion about the Vatican’s position on China, but in a call with reporters last week he said that he believed it was in everyone’s interests for the specifics of the Vatican-China deal to be made public.