By Terry Friel
The small Catholic population in the Buddhist kingdom of Cambodia will join their brethren around the world in celebrating All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day this weekend.
Catholics in cathedrals and churches around the country will “honor the saints who devoted their lives to the Christian faith, but who have no specific feast day in their name, and remember the ‘faithfully departed’ relatives, friends and strangers,” Father Paul Lay said this week.
“We will join the broader Catholic Church,” the parish priest serving parishioners across two provinces between the Cambodian capital and the Vietnamese border told UCA News.
Catholics in Cambodia also observe the Khmer festival honoring the dead, Pchum Ben, with the blessing of the Church as part of its commitment to honoring Khmer culture in its mission. That was last month.
“But our communities who are mainly Vietnamese, still keep the universal calendar of these two feasts,” the priest said.
“But the Buddhist belief about the ‘souls of the dead’ is totally different from the Catholic faith. That is the challenge we face.”
Minh Tran, a worker at a small pharmacy in Phnom Penh, says she will be lighting candles for her ancestors on Nov 2.
“We must honor our ancestors,” she told UCA News. “Tradition is important. And this year, All Souls’ is a special obligation, because it falls on a Sunday.”
The Church has a long history almost 500 years in what is now Cambodia.
Portuguese missionaries arrived in 1555. With French support, the Church grew in the former French colony, with the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral completed in 1962 only to be destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in 1976.
Various estimates put the number of Catholics in Cambodia at around 75,000, or less than two percent of the population of 17.5 million. They are mainly minority ethnic Cham with roots in Vietnam. Many of Cambodia’s leading clergy are foreign mostly from the Paris Foreign Missions (MEP).
But it now has 15 native Khmer priests: 13 diocesan priests and two religious priests. Recently, it ordained its first Cambodian bishop since the Khmer Rouge regime, Monsignor Pierre Suon Hang Ly, who is also the new Coadjutor Vicar Apostolic of Phnom Penh.
Father Paul’s own story is the story of the Church in modern Cambodia. Born a Buddhist in Phnom Penh in 1960 of mixed Chinese-Khmer-Vietnamese heritage, he has lived through every war and conflict over the past 65 years including surviving the Khmer Rouge.
He fled to a refugee camp on the Thai border in 1984.
“At Christmas in 1990, some of my friends and I were asked by the Catholic Church to be security guards during the Christmas night,” he recalls.
“I saw how joyful the faithful were in the church singing, wishing each other peace. From that day, I asked myself, maybe there is a God who is present in these people, making them happy.
“A few days later, I went to the church asking to learn catechisms, the Bible. I was baptized in 1992. Then some months later, I returned to Cambodia to join a seminary in Battambang.”
He was ordained in 2001 as a priest for the Kampong Cham Apostolic Prefecture. He is in charge of communities in the provinces of Prey Veng and Svay Rieng, between Phnom Penh and the Vietnamese border to the east. – UCA News
