Catholic Church in Cambodia

Based on Wikipedia: Catholic Church in Cambodia

In 1990, for the first time in fifteen years, a group of Catholics in Cambodia gathered to celebrate Easter Sunday in public. The permission came from a government that had, just a decade earlier, presided over one of the most thorough destructions of religious life in modern history. Two-thirds of the country's remaining Catholics had perished in forced labor camps. The rest had worshipped in secret or not at all.

This is the story of a church that has been founded, destroyed, and rebuilt multiple times across five centuries—always remaining a tiny minority in a predominantly Buddhist nation, always finding ways to persist.

The First Failure

The first Christian missionary to reach Cambodia was a Portuguese Dominican friar named Gaspar da Cruz, who arrived in 1555. By his own account, the mission was a complete disaster.

Cruz found himself in a kingdom run by what he called "Bramenes"—a term derived from the Sanskrit word for Brahmin, indicating Hindu-influenced officials and rulers. The religious and political establishment was deeply intertwined, and Cruz quickly realized that no one would dare convert without explicit royal permission. Such permission was not forthcoming.

After roughly a year of fruitless effort, Cruz left Cambodia having baptized exactly one person—and that person had died shortly after. "I left in the grave," he wrote bitterly. It was an inauspicious beginning.

Three Centuries of Minimal Progress

You might expect that French colonization in the nineteenth century would have changed things. After all, France brought Catholicism wherever its empire spread, from Vietnam to Senegal to the Caribbean. Vietnam, Cambodia's neighbor, became home to one of Asia's largest Catholic populations.

But Cambodia proved stubbornly resistant. Theravada Buddhism—the older, more conservative branch of Buddhism practiced throughout Southeast Asia—had become so thoroughly woven into Khmer identity and culture that Christianity simply could not find purchase. The religion of the colonizers remained the religion of foreigners.

This created an unusual demographic pattern that persists to this day: the majority of Catholics in Cambodia have historically been ethnic Vietnamese, not ethnic Khmer. As late as 2005, roughly two-thirds of Cambodian Catholics were Vietnamese. The faith existed in Cambodia but had never quite become Cambodian.

The First Cambodian Priests

It took until 1957—four centuries after Gaspar da Cruz's failed mission—for the Catholic Church to ordain its first native Cambodian priest. His name was Simon Chhem Yen.

Think about what that means. For four hundred years, every Catholic priest serving in Cambodia was a foreigner. The church had never developed local leadership, never fully translated its practices into Khmer culture.

Two more Cambodian priests followed: Paul Tep Im Sotha in 1959 and Joseph Chhmar Salas in 1964. These three men represented something genuinely new—Cambodian voices within a church that had always spoken with foreign accents.

By the early 1950s, Vatican statistics counted about 120,000 Catholics in Cambodia, making it nominally the country's second-largest religion. But roughly half were ethnic Vietnamese. And the numbers would soon plummet.

The Collapse

In 1970, General Lon Nol overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk and established the Khmer Republic—a military junta backed by the United States. His government was explicitly Khmer nationalist and anti-Vietnamese. Large numbers of Vietnamese Catholics fled the country. Cambodia's major seminary closed indefinitely.

By 1972, only about 20,000 Christians remained in Cambodia, many of them French or of French descent. The Khmer Republic tolerated Catholics but did little to support them.

Then came April 17, 1975.

The Khmer Rouge, a communist revolutionary movement led by Pol Pot, captured Phnom Penh and immediately began evacuating the cities. What followed was one of the most extreme social experiments in human history—an attempt to create a purely agrarian, classless society by eliminating everyone associated with the old order.

Religion was banned entirely. Not just restricted or discouraged—banned. Buddhist monks were forced to disrobe or killed. Muslim Cham communities were systematically targeted. And the tiny Catholic population faced elimination.

Joseph Chhmar Salas—one of those first three Cambodian priests—died in a forced labor camp. Paul Tep Im Sotha was executed. The church counted two-thirds of its remaining members dead by the time the Vietnamese invaded and toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

The Long Road Back

The Vietnamese-backed government that replaced the Khmer Rouge was communist but considerably less murderous. In 1989, a new constitution allowed freedom of religion, though preaching Christianity remained officially forbidden by the Council of Ministers.

Then came March 1990—that first public Easter mass in fifteen years.

The practical work of rebuilding started in an unlikely place: the refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border, where hundreds of thousands of Khmer people had fled during the wars. Catholic clergy began training seminarians there, and for the first time in the church's history, instruction was conducted entirely in the Khmer language.

In 1992, a French priest named Bernard Dupraz brought four seminarians from the camps back into Cambodia proper, setting up in Battambang—the country's second-largest city, in the northwest near the Thai border. They rented a private house to use as a seminary.

The conditions were improvised, even covert. Educational materials had to be smuggled across the Thai border, passed in sacks by sympathetic clergy to avoid alerting guards. The seminarians weren't just students—they functioned almost as assistant priests, traveling to remote areas like Serei Saophoan and Siem Reap to assess the situation and report back.

A Church Rises from Almost Nothing

In 1993, Dupraz managed to purchase the land where the old Battambang Parish had stood before 1970. He was the only priest in an area covering roughly one-third of Cambodia's territory. The seminarians became his only support network.

On March 25, 1994, Cambodia established formal diplomatic relations with the Holy See—the Vatican's political arm. It was a signal that the country's isolation was ending.

The following year brought a symbolic milestone: Pierre Sophal Tonlop became the first native Cambodian ordained as a Catholic priest in more than twenty years. The chain that had begun with Simon Chhem Yen in 1957 and seemed broken forever under the Khmer Rouge was reconnected.

In 1998, a new Khmer translation of the Bible was published. The first complete Khmer Bible had been translated by an American Protestant missionary named Arthur L. Hammond, completed in 1940 though not published until 1954. The new translation was ecumenical—meaning Catholics and Protestants worked on it together—and aimed to be more natural and readable than Hammond's more literal version.

That same year, Dupraz's seminary moved to Phnom Penh and received an official name: the St. John Mary Vianney Major Seminary, chosen by the seminarians themselves. John Vianney was a nineteenth-century French priest known as the "Curé of Ars"—a patron saint of parish priests, an apt choice for men rebuilding a church from almost nothing.

The Grenade and the Seminarian

The revival was not without violence.

On October 17, 1996, at a Jesuit school for disabled students in Kandal Province, a Cambodian man named Soram confronted school staff. He had been expelled for disruptive behavior—Soram was a former soldier—and he arrived with a hand grenade, threatening to throw it into a classroom full of students.

A twenty-six-year-old Filipino Jesuit seminarian named Richard Fernando saw what was happening. As Soram approached the classroom, Fernando grabbed him, trying to restrain him and prevent him from throwing the explosive.

In the struggle, Soram dropped the grenade. It exploded.

Fernando died. But as he fell, he fell over Soram, shielding the man who had just killed him. Soram survived the blast. So did the students in the classroom.

A 1999 documentary called Greater Love: In Memory of Richie Fernando, SJ tells his story. The cause for his beatification—the first step toward sainthood in the Catholic Church—was opened in 2017. He may one day be officially recognized as a martyr, killed while performing an act of mercy.

The Church Today

How many Catholics are there in Cambodia now? The numbers vary depending on who you ask and when.

In 1994, estimates put the population around 25,000. A decade later, in 2005, the number was apparently unchanged. By 2015, some sources suggested it had actually declined to about 20,000—roughly 0.15 percent of Cambodia's population.

But other observers claim significant growth. A 2017 report in The Diplomat cited a figure of 75,000—three times the official estimates. The discrepancy likely reflects how different people count: active parishioners versus everyone who might identify as Catholic, ethnic Khmer versus ethnic Vietnamese, those in formal parishes versus those in remote areas.

The Catholic Church in Cambodia is organized not into dioceses—the standard territorial units of church governance—but into three territorial jurisdictions of a more provisional type. There is one Apostolic Vicariate (Phnom Penh) and two Apostolic Prefectures (Battambang and Kompong Cham). These designations are typically used for mission territories where the church is still developing.

In June 2025, Pierre Suon Hangly was appointed Coadjutor Vicar Apostolic of Phnom Penh—making him the first Cambodian to hold a top church position since Tep Im and Chhmar in the 1960s, both of whom died under the Khmer Rouge. Hangly was one of those original four seminarians who had trained in the Thai refugee camps and returned with Father Dupraz in 1992.

A Minority Within a Minority

What does it mean to be Catholic in Cambodia?

It means belonging to a faith that has never been more than a footnote in the country's religious landscape. Theravada Buddhism claims over 95 percent of Cambodians. Islam, practiced mainly by the Cham minority, accounts for most of the rest. Christianity—both Catholic and Protestant combined—barely registers in census data.

It means worshipping in a language that the church only began fully using in the 1990s, in buildings that may be newer than you are, led by priests who may be the first or second generation of Cambodian clergy.

It means carrying the memory of near-extinction. Every priest ordained today works in the shadow of Tep Im and Chhmar, who did not survive to see the church rebuilt.

And it means, perhaps, understanding something about persistence that more established churches might never learn. The Catholic Church in Cambodia has existed for nearly five centuries. For most of that time, it seemed like a failed transplant, a foreign institution that would never take root. Then it was destroyed almost completely. And still it came back.

When those Catholics gathered for Easter mass in March 1990—the first public worship in fifteen years—they were not celebrating a triumph. They were celebrating survival. Sometimes that is enough.