CAMBODIA Ethnic Minority Catholic Community Gets New Church

Posted: 10th July 2007

Saint Peter Church

PHNOM PENH (UCAN) -- Ethnic Vietnamese Catholics in Cambodia's capital celebrated a milestone as a faith community with the opening of their new parish church.
Hundreds of people gathered on July 1 for the opening of St. Peter Church in a Phnom Penh suburb. The two-story, 500-seat church, built in a Vietnamese design, serves about 200 ethnic Vietnamese who migrated here from other parts of the country.

This ethnic faith community started in 1992, with five families who came looking for jobs. In the beginning they gathered together to pray in one of their houses every Sunday. After a few months the Catholics constructed a small building that served as their church.

In 1994, more ethnic Vietnamese Catholic families came from areas in the country that suffered flooding. Now the community comprises 35 families, with members employed in construction and factory work, or as motorcycle-taxi drivers and garbage collectors. Some run small businesses from their homes.

Community leader Pok Vary, 33, told UCA News at the church opening that their previous worship place was very small, and many people had to sit outside every Sunday to attend Mass. Having the new church constructed, however, was not easy, especially raising the US$150,000 they needed for this.

In 1996, Father Peter Le Van Tinh, priest in charge of the Vietnamese community in Cambodia, began looking for benefactors. It was not until 2006 that enough funds were secured.

Vary's mother, who lives in the United States, helped make much of it possible. Vary said that when local Catholics could not come up with enough funds, her mother donated money from her savings and collected from other Vietnamese in the United States. That money met half the cost of the church building. The rest came from Catholics in Cambodia and Vietnam.
The local Catholics want their new church to be more than just a building. "I hope in the future St. Peter Church will help nurture Christian faith in the community amid our Buddhist brothers and sisters," Long Na, a 68-year-old parishioner, told UCA News.

Even though the parish does not yet have a resident priest, Catholics organize their own parish activities such as visiting sick people and bringing them to the hospital. Catechists come from outside the parish to teach catechism every Sunday. Khmer language classes are also organized. The Khmer are the predominant ethnic group among Cambodia's 12 million people, 95 percent of whom are Buddhists.

Pon Pheap, a Buddhist motorcycle-taxi driver who was invited to the opening of the new church, told UCA News, "I am really happy my Christian brothers and sisters have a new building for worship." Pheap, 45, remembered the previous small church from when he arrived in the area 10 years ago. He said he has never had any problem with his Catholic neighbors despite differences in ethnicity and religion.

The parish is part of Phnom Penh apostolic vicariate, one of three Church jurisdictions in Cambodia. According to Church records for 2007, the vicariate has more than 13,000 Catholics living in 35 communities. Countrywide, there are more than 30,000 Catholics of whom about two-thirds are ethnic Vietnamese, according to a Church source.

Cambodia was gripped by civil war from the 1960s until the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot seized control of Phnom Penh in 1975. A purge against ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia that began in 1970 was continued under Pol Pot, who is blamed for the deaths of from 500,000 to 2 million Cambodians before Vietnamese troops forced him from power in 1979. The Khmer Rouge tried to wipe out all traces of the Church and to suppress other religions. No native priest or nun survived in Cambodia.

After the restoration of religious freedom in 1991, missioners began to return to rebuild the local Church, working among Khmer and ethnic Vietnamese Catholics in fishing villages along the Tonle Sap -- the largest lake in Southeast Asia -- and the river from it that joins the Mekong at Phnom Penh. A Church worker explained that many Catholic fishing families came from Vietnam to settle along the Mekong River and Tonle Sap in Cambodia

Article Source: UCAN