CV NEWS FEED // Nearly 50 years after Cambodia’s Maoist Khmer Rouge regime destroyed Phnom Penh’s iconic Notre Dame Cathedral, a new Catholic church is set to rise in its place.
The church, a $3 million project blending traditional Khmer and Catholic architectural styles, is located in the northern outskirts of Phnom Penh and is expected to be finished by July and consecrated in November, UCA News reported March 17.
The new building, constructed on the site of St. Joseph’s, a Catholic church currently housed in an old seminary, may serve as the city’s new cathedral.
Father Paul Chatsirey, pastor of St. Joseph’s, described the Catholic community as open and welcoming.
“[W]e are like a small village, and it means we welcome everyone here,” he told UCA News. “We are proud that we can see the church rise again.”
The destruction of Cambodia’s former cathedral was part of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign, which began in 1975. Under the regime’s radical “Year Zero” policies, approximately 2.3 million people perished due to starvation, mass executions, and forced labor.
Before the war, Cambodia’s Catholic population was around 100,000. By the Khmer Rouge regime’s fall in 1979, an estimated 40,000 Catholics had been killed, and churches across the country had been destroyed or left in ruins. Notre Dame Cathedral, once considered the most beautiful building in Phnom Penh, was singled out for total destruction.
Once the Khmer Rouge regime was defeated, Cambodia’s Catholic community slowly began to recover. In 1992, United Nations peacekeepers arrived in the country, and Catholics who had fled abroad began returning.
The following year, the Cambodian government restored confiscated Church property, including the site of a former seminary in Phnom Penh. This land became home to St. Joseph’s, where Mass has been conducted since then and where the new cathedral is now under construction.
The idea of building a new cathedral on the site emerged in 2019. By 2021, construction was underway, funded by donations from Catholics in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, along with support from The Society of Foreign Missions of Paris.
“This is not just the first church built in Cambodia since the Khmer Rouge took over the country,” one anonymous churchgoer told UCA News. “[I]t’s also the first cathedral to be built in Southeast Asia since God knows when.”
Although the new church will be significantly smaller than the original Notre Dame Cathedral, which had a capacity of up to 10,000 people, it is expected to become the center of Cambodia’s Catholic community.
With a seating capacity of 700 and traditional wooden pews, the cathedral will provide a permanent place of worship for Cambodia’s estimated 25,000 Catholics who are spread across 107 parishes.
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