Category: Church

The Catholic Church in Cambodia.

An interesting Saturday…

Yesterday turned out to be a very interesting Saturday. President Biden flew in on Air Force One in the morning for the ASEAN summit meeting held in Phnom Penh this weekend. He is Catholic and I had read that he tries to go to mass on Sundays wherever he is, so I was not too surprised when the US Embassy here asked me to have mass with him yesterday. The time for the mass changed three times during the week but finally we had a morning mass at the Raffles Hotel where the United States delegation was staying.

President Biden is a very warm and personable person, a good human being guided by gospel values. We had a group of ten people for mass, staff from the White House and the Phnom Penh U.S. Embassy. At the end of mass, noting that it was lunch time, President Biden invited me to eat with them!
This is The Beast, the vehicle used to transport President Biden on the ground. It rated its own separate enclosure on the grounds of the Raffles Hotel. I was hoping they would offer me a ride home in The Beast but I had to settle for the usual tuk-tuk.
The U.S. delegation took over the entire Raffles Hotel and made many adjustments. Here the main lobby and reception desk is blocked off by partitions erected to move people like me through security. Secret Service personnel were everywhere!

Quite an interesting day!

Mission Sunday

This year Bishop Olivier invited the lay missioners working in Phnom Penh to attend mass with him on Mission Sunday. There are not nearly the numbers of lay missioners we had before.

After mass Bishop Olivier blessed the ashes of two veteran lay missioners who died here in the past year.
Then the lay missioners met for more than an hour with Bishop Olivier as he discussed his thought and plans for the diocese and for the missioners.
Before we left we had a group photo.

60 Years after Vatican II

This week was the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church. It’s good to remember what the Council accomplished. And the best summation comes from the late John W. O’Malley, SJ, in “What Happened at Vatican II.” In short, the church moved from “commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive acceptances to active engagement, from fault-finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principles, from behavior modification to inner appropriation.”

[From Fr. James Martin’s Twitter]

Musica Felice Concert

Today Ms. Miwako Fujiwara produced another charity concert at the Sofitel Hotel ballroom. Her productions are always wonderful musically and this time she added some rather extravagant traditional Khmer dances.

The Musica Felice singers and musicians with Miwako conducting.
Traditonal Khmer dancers accompanied some of the musical selections.
At the intermission, Miwako joined the group from the Maryknoll Deaf Development Programme for a photo.

USA Trip 2022

Sunday, 25 September 2022

St. James baptismal font


In the morning John and Moya and I went to St. James Church for mass. One of the priests on the altar recognized me and welcomed me at the announcement time at the end. The two people who heard my name came up after mass and introduced themselves. One of them I took to Mammoth Cave with our St. Lawrence youth group back in the 70s and the other had two sisters I taught at Angela Merici High School.


After lunch my sister Mary tooks us to Parklands, a 4,000 acre park complex where she worked before retirement. It is a 100-year concept: in 100 years Louisville will have grown out to the park now beyond the suburbs and it will be a park within the city. It is beautiful with a silo lookout tower, miles and miles of heavily wooded trails, a stream for kayaking, and many places for people to be immersed in nature.

In the evening cousins who had met the night before at a center were invited to gather at the house of Julie and Eric for another family event. Their house just that day had been part of a ten-house tour of significant houses. Eric is an architect and designed their home. It is a wonderful place to live.

DK Centre Mass

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.

Will it work out?

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.

Women in the image of God

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.

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.

She Who Is (p. 4)