Category: Church

The exterior of the new St. Joseph Church in Phnom Penh is mostly finished. The big holdup in using the church is the interior. They need money to add pews or chairs, statues, etc., and a technical design in the ceiling is giving them fits. No construction people here have ever put up a curved ceiling like the architect called for. There are still a few outside details to take care of also. The compound wall was removed and replaced with a fence so people can see the church. Today workmen were spray painting the gate for the new fence.

Today the Phnom Penh diocese had its quarterly meeting of all the priests.

Today we had our first Ash Wednesday service at the St. Jude Thaddeus School site. It was something of a test run to see how many people wanted to come, could find St. Jude School, and would brave the heat after a 97ºF afternoon. They came. We used basically every chair the school had and people were still standing.

In previous years we had two Ash Wednesday services, on opposite sides of town, but this year just the one gathering and it was crowded.

I told the priest to keep the homily short and he did.

Around the world, Ash Wednesday is one of the most well attended religious services and we certainly had an outpouring for our English Catholic Community.

My birthday was last Saturday, a week ago, when I was in Bangkok to get a new visa. I didn’t think much about my birthday then and certainly not much since then, but today at the end of mass some of the parishioners surprised me with a cake!

Today the church celebrates the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple 40 days after his birth, a prescription of the Law of Moses. An elderly man, Simeon, recognizes the baby as the messiah, “a light for the gentiles,” and from that reference the church picked this day for blessing candles used through the church year. We had a blessing of candles today–and some people seemed to make a point of dropping pools of wax on the floor. Three of us spent 45 minutes after everyone left to scrape up wax before the Khmer community had their afternoon mass.

Fr. François Ponchaud died two weeks ago in France. He first came to Cambodia in 1965 and was the major influence in rebuilding the Catholic Church in the kingdom after the Khmer Rouge.

In the Catholic liturgical year, today–the feast of the baptism of Jesus–is the end of the Christmas season and tomorrow begins the first day of the cycle of Ordinary Time for the church.

Today is the last day this Christmas creche will be displayed. Note the carved wooden figures, about 18-inches high. They are made from extremely dense and hard luxury woods from Cambodia and each is worth$300 to $500. These luxury woods are a sign of achievement and success in Cambodian culture. If you can acquire these, you are successful in life.

30 years ago the parish community of the Church of the Child Jesus moved out of a residential house they were worshiping in and erected one of the first post-Khmer Rouge actual church buildings. This past weekend their parish celebrated their anniversary.

In the early afternoon, Father François Hemelsdael and some of the parishioners greeted the first guests to arrive for the 4:00 PM anniversary mass.

Fr. Gianluca and Fr. Oh Chang were two of the priests who came for the celebration.

The parish had set up a wonderful display of information and old photos and it was a good gathering place for the visitors to meet.

Bishop Kike from Battambang was one of the guests.

The displays really were interesting and taught the younger members of the parish a lot about the early days of their community.