After 50 years, Cambodia about to have a cathedral

The construction of a cathedral is entering its final stages in the northern section of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital city (pictured above). Located on the site of a former seminary, the work on this cathedral began in 2021. 

At a total cost of about 3 million USD, project funding came from the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris along with donations from many Catholics in Southeast Asia. 

The project's completion is expected this July and the consecration is planned for November. The new cathedral will have enough seating for 700 persons and features a blend of architectural styles from both Southeast Asia and the West. 

Though Cambodia is a former French colony, it has never had a large Catholic population. Currently, less than half of one percent of the total population is Catholic (so about 20,000 Catholics), and most of them are ethnic Vietnamese. The vast majority of Cambodia's main ethnic group (the Khmer) are Buddhist. 

Cambodia has not had a cathedral for half a century. 

After the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, its henchmen demolished Cambodia's former cathedral, a massive French Gothic style building that had a seating capacity of thousands. 

Though most of its parishioners were themselves Asian, the cathedral was seen as a towering symbol of Cambodia's colonial past. And the revolutionary Khmer Rouge was seeking to cut all links with the past, along with all ties to any religion or foreign influence. 

The cathedral was the first building they took down. The iron bars used to reinforce its structure were then extracted. Some of the iron was converted into nails, while other iron bars were made into shackles for detainees at Khmer Rouge interrogation centers that soon operated throughout the country. 

Let's break this down for a minute: It's one thing to demolish a church for ideological reasons. But it's a whole new depth of treachery to take the metal used to build that church and convert it into instruments of human confinement during acts of torture. 

Such was the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. During that period, as much as one-third of the country's population died due to disease, starvation, execution or other forms of mistreatment. 

Catholics in Cambodia incurred an even higher rate of fatality: Almost half of them died, succumbing one way or another during the madness that saw a nation devour itself. 

Though the Khmer Rouge had been driven out of Phnom Penh by 1979, they held regional power in mountainous parts of western Cambodia until the end of the millennium. 

Even in the capital city, conditions remained so tenuous that Catholics were not able to pray publicly until 1990, when a Mass was held on Easter Sunday.

The year 1992 saw the UN come to occupy Cambodia in a massive effort at peacekeeping. As part of this endeavor, UN workers supervised a democratic election to decide the country's new ruler. 

Though the UN mission brought mixed results overall, the traumatized country did eventually regain a sense of normalcy. 

And with its impending new cathedral, the Church in Cambodia is set to fully return.