Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
The Catholic Church in Cambodia.
Recently we started our Saturday evening mass in a new venue. With our smaller crowd now post-Covid, we are able to use the DK Centre on the south side of Phnom Penh where many of our parishioners live. Click here to see how we celebrate there.
When Covid closed the churches in March, 2020 our English Catholic Community had to leave our “home” at World Vision on the south side of Phnom Penh. Many people–those who didn’t leave the country when so many schools and businesses closed–bemoaned the need to travel across Phnom Penh to St. Joseph Church for mass. Now we have been able to resume mass on the south side again, at the DK Centre. It offers quite a nice auditorium that we used before special occasions like Ash Wednesday.
We are having our Saturday mass there during the month of July to see if people find out about the new venue and if they come. We need a certain number of people to be able to afford this new expense.
Following up last Sunday’s first reading from Isaiah which gave a feminine image for God, here is a selection from theologian Elizabeth Johnson:
The women’s movement in civil society and the church has shed a bright light on the pervasive exclusion of women from the realm of public symbol formation and decision making, and women’s consequent strong enforced subordination to the imagination and needs of a world designed chiefly by men. In the church this exclusion has been effective virtually everywhere: in ecclesial creeds, doctrines, prayers, theological systems, liturgical worship, patterns of spirituality, visions of mission, church order, leadership and discipline.
She Who Is (p. 4)
It has been stunningly effective in speech about God. While officially it is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, yet the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman, or at least more fittingly addressed as male than as female…. Upon examination it becomes clear that this exclusive speech about God serves in manifold ways to support…a world that excludes or subordinates women. Wittingly or not, it undermines women’s human dignity as equally created in the image of God.
