Category: Church

Normally we have most of a week to take down the Advent decorations and replace them with Christmas trimmings, but this year the last Sunday of Advent was today and tomorrow, Christmas Eve, is the beginning of the Christmas season so we had to change the church environment today.  Click here to see the crew that gathered for the task.

In this Buddhist country, probably a good number of people would know that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus—but they wouldn’t know much about who Jesus is.  And the greatly larger portion of the population would associate Christmas with Santa Claus and Father Christmas rather than with Jesus.  Santa Clauses are everywhere.  They sell things.  Jesus is nowhere to be seen.

Some church groups get caught up in this cultural confusion.  At the Catholic school where I have mass on Fridays,  they contribute to the confusion with this nativity set to which a Christmas bear and Father Christmas have been invited.  Maybe I should be satisfied that at least the manger is still empty.

This weekend as we celebrated the Third Sunday of Advent, we also included a memorial service for Br. Terry Heinrich who died three weeks ago.  Click here to see photos from the service.

At World Vision, we rent their hall and so have to set up for mass every week and decorate the room with banners, candles, etc.  When Fr. Bob Wynne was here, he made sure that the seasons were kept distinct and arranged all the changes in colors, banners, etc.  Now that he is gone, things sometimes go awry.

Here is a picture of our Advent Wreath as we celebrate the 3rd Sunday of Advent.  That’s great.  But on the pillar behind the wreath, is a Christmas wreath, a decoration that shouldn’t have gone up yet.  Today we were supposed to have violet banners hanging on all the pillars but….

I took 400 new English Missals to World Vision on Saturday night for that community and we rather quickly got them put into the plastic covers with the music books.

Sunday morning I took 300 English Missals to St. Joseph Church and our crew of helpers joined right in to put the missals together with the songbooks in the old plastic covers.  Here they are at work.

A group of parents in the English-speaking Catholic community have formed a Fun Play Group to allow their children to meet and be friends with other children in a fun atmosphere with a little prayer and reflection to help the children grow in a positive setting.

The group met Saturday night after the evening mass and a good time was had by all!

Because we have a multi-cultural congregation in the English-speaking Catholic community, we provide a paper missal that allows people to read the scripture readings when they are being proclaimed by the lector at mass.  For 95+% of our congregation, English is their second, third, or fourth language so sometimes they don’t catch the full meaning of only the spoken word.

The new English Missals for the church’s new liturgical year got lost this year.  They were shipped from Ho Chi Minh City on 14 November but we didn’t pick them up here until last Wednesday.  Then today I took 400 of them in a tuk-tuk to World Vision where we have our Saturday night mass in their auditorium.

Couples for Christ is quite active in Cambodia—and throughout Asia–and today they had a Christian Life Seminar to encourage believers to live out their faith more fully.  I gave the open talk in the two-day program, about Jesus and who he is.

If you’re curious about what the English-speaking Catholic community is up to here in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, click on the link below to subscribe to our newsletter e-mailed every Friday evening.  You can always unsubscribe through the link at the bottom of each newsletter.