A church in Cambodia, the second-oldest church left standing from the Khmer Rouge era, is being restored ahead of its centenary in 2028. Source: UCA News.
The Church of Mount Bokor is Cambodia’s most iconic Catholic Church. It is a century-old testimony to the resilience of the Catholic community in the overwhelmingly Buddhist kingdom, through a century of colonial partying, the turmoil of civil war, genocide, Vietnamese occupation and the virtual annihilation of the Catholic faith.
Now it is being brought back to life for its centenary in 2028, a symbol of the steady rebirth of the Church since the dark days of the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese invasion and decade-long occupation they triggered.
Mount Bokor is the second-oldest church left standing by the Khmer Rouge, who destroyed almost all the dozens of churches around the country in their pogrom to wipe out all Western influence in their radical quest for an agrarian communist utopia.
Most of those that survived, like Bokor, were repurposed as food warehouses and shelters, and later as military strongholds.
Bokor, with its strategic mountaintop position, was used as a fortress and ammunition bunker by the Khmer Rouge well into the 1990s.
Cambodia’s oldest surviving Catholic church is St Mary’s, in the village of Taom, 60 kilometres southwest of Siem Reap, home to Angkor Wat, and built in 1910.
St Mary’s survived because it, too, was used as a food and livestock barn and as a place to house civilians.
The restoration of the weathered, lichen-covered sandstone Mount Bokor church, crowning a 1000-meter peak in a national park in the Elephant Mountains 200 kilometres southwest of Phnom Penh, is about more than an historic building.
It’s about celebrating the remarkable rebirth of the Catholic Church as a vibrant community since the first missionaries after the ouster of the Khmer Rouge returned in 1989 — to a traumatised country with barely 3000 Catholics still alive.
“We are resurrecting the ruins not merely as a historical monument but as a living Church — a mountaintop sanctuary for prayer, pilgrimage, and evangelisation in the spirit of reconciliation and hope,” said Fr Will Conquer, a member of the core restoration team and the Steering Committee for the Bokor Church Renewal Project.
FULL STORY
Breathing new life into Cambodia’s iconic century-old church (By Terry Friel, UCA News)
