Cambodian History Writ Large At Angkor Wat

January 25, 2008
By LESLIE HOOK
The Wall Street Journal

SIEM REAP, Cambodia -- This country's most famous temple may be 900 years old, but the message it sets out to convey is timeless: Angkor Wat is all about glory. The temple is one of hundreds built by kings of the Khmer Empire to commemorate themselves and their empire, as well as to worship their gods. But Angkor Wat stands out from the rest -- in artistry, in scale and in popular imagery.

One of the largest religious structures in the world, and the only religious monument to appear on a national flag, Angkor Wat has become synonymous with Cambodia at its most powerful -- when it was the seat of the Khmer Empire, stretching from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The monumental scale of the temple has the same effect on visitors today as when it was first built. Angkor Wat has but a single approach: a wide stone causeway more than a third of a mile long (that's as long as six football fields end-to-end). The entry walkway crosses a moat 600 feet wide (my guide assures me it used to be filled with crocodiles) and ends at a wall and gates leading into the center of the compound. The central compound covers about 400 acres and once supported a town of about 100,000 people.

With one central tower more than 130 feet high surrounded by four shorter towers, the center of the temple imitates the five peaks of Mount Mehru, the mythical mountain at the center of the Hindu universe. The temple walls (three concentric rectangles that demarcate the progressively higher levels of the temple), garden grounds and moat represent the soil and seas of the earth.

Reaching Mount Mehru is no easy chore: The temple's stone steps are dizzyingly steep -- more like a stone ladder than a staircase -- as a reminder of the effort it takes for humans to get closer to heaven. And, as if to drive home the point, the inner sanctuaries of the central tower were accessible only to the king and a select handful of priests.

When Angkor Wat was built, Cambodia was primarily Hindu and Khmer culture drew much of its inspiration from India. Most of the inscriptions at Angkor are in Sanskrit, and the nymph-like apsaras, or celestial dancers, that grace the walls derive from Hindu mythology. Later, however, the Khmer kings became interested in Buddhism, and Angkor Wat was converted into a Buddhist monastery between the 12th and 15th centuries. The central statue of the innermost sanctuary -- likely a statue of Vishnu -- was removed and a Buddhist image erected in its place. For several centuries, the Khmer empire practiced a syncretic faith that combined Buddhism and Hinduism.

In many ways Angkor Wat is so much larger than life that the details of the temple get overlooked amid the legends that surround it. It's easy to forget that it contains nearly 2,000 feet of the finest Khmer bas reliefs in the world. Its nearly 2,000 celestial apsaras represent the apogee of Cambodia's apsara-carving tradition and provide a detailed account of court dress and female fashions during the period of its creation, the elaborate headdresses, heavy jewelry worn on the arms and neck, and flowing skirts. Traditional Cambodian dance to this day imitates the apsaras' poses and costumes.

One of the most intricate reliefs decorating the walls of the temple's first gallery depicts the Churning of the Sea of Milk, a key event in Hindu cosmology in which the world was created by an epic tug-of-war between gods and demons. Each side pulled on a giant five-headed snake wrapped around Mount Mehru, and the subsequent twisting of the mountain and churning of the seas gave birth to the apsaras that grace the walls of Angkor Wat, as well as an elixir of immortality over which the gods and demons subsequently dueled. In this story, Mount Mehru is not only the center of the universe, but also the birthplace of the known world.

The Khmer empire included modern-day Burma, Thailand and Vietnam -- the largest area ever covered by Cambodia -- and laid the foundations for Cambodian culture and art for centuries to come. In a sign of the temple's importance, the king's palace was most likely on the temple grounds, although nothing of it remains today. About one million men, women and children populated the Angkor area, according to an estimate by French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier, making it the largest settlement in the preindustrial world.

All this manpower was necessary to build the temples, which were painstakingly erected from giant sandstone monoliths hewed out of a quarry more than 37 miles away. Rather than having foundations that sink into the ground, most Angkorean temples are built on huge mounds of earth that give them their pyramid shape, the soil excavated from a moat or from one of the lakes. Some historians theorize that the blitz of building during the Khmer Empire could have been accomplished only through a mandatory labor requirement levied on all citizens, or perhaps even through slavery.

The grandeur that marked the Khmer Empire was not to last, however. The royal city of Angkor was repeatedly sacked by the Thai army during the 14th century, and in 1431 the capital was relocated farther away from Thailand. Angkor Wat itself -- by that time converted to a Buddhist temple -- continued to function, and for centuries it was home to a flourishing monastery that attracted pilgrims from as far away as Japan, even while the former capital city nearby was gradually overtaken by the jungle. Although the Buddhists occupying the temple removed most of the original Hindu art, Angkor Wat's habitation and its continuous maintenance helped the temple remain relatively intact while many other Angkorean temples now lie in ruins.

Even after surviving the removal of its Hindu art, Angkor Wat did not entirely escape the turbulence of Cambodia's recent history. The Western part of Cambodia in which Angkor Wat is located was a Khmer Rouge stronghold through the 1990s (the Khmer Rouge were ousted from the capital city, Phnom Penh, in 1979). Restoration work on the temples took a forced, decades-long hiatus during the wars that wracked Cambodia through the later half of the 20th century. The area was unsafe for tourists until about 10 years ago, when the Khmer Rouge signed a peace treaty that formally ended Cambodia's civil war. There was relatively little physical damage to the temple as a result of the wars, but they did irreparable damage by destroying almost all of the remaining written records pertaining to the Angkorean period. Khmer archaeology scholar Christophe Pottier of the French Research School of the Far East estimates that 95% of the relevant documents have been destroyed in the past three decades, an irreplaceable loss.

In the years since peace has come to Cambodia the opportunities for looting have also increased, and many of the finest sculptures have been spirited out of the country and sold to buyers abroad. Tourism also poses its own set of dangers, with some temples suffering from overexposure to footsteps or curious hands. But despite this -- even as the physical structures of the temples inevitably decay -- Angkor will continue to symbolize something greater than itself. The memory of the Khmer Empire, and with it Cambodia's full potential, is unlikely to fade anytime soon.

Ms. Hook is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Asia.

Indian index has a religious edge

Jan 23, 2008
By Raja M
Asia Times (Hong Kong)

MUMBAI - The global trend towards socially responsible investing has gone religious in India, with Dow Jones Indexes and its US-based partner investment firm Dharma Investments Ltd launching the Dow Jones Dharma India Index in Mumbai on January 15, the first major faith-based investment product in South Asia.

The Dharma India index is the latest addition to the 130,000 stock indexes Dow Jones publishes globally, including the US, Britain and Japan versions of The Dow Jones Dharma Index.

The Dharma India Index, with 250 Indian companies, features stocks compliant with the code of moral conduct according to Hinduism, teachings of the Buddha and which also incorporate principles of the Sikh and Jain religious tenets - together, ways of life with billions of followers in Asia and forming nearly 20% of the human race.

The index license is sold to asset managers and others wishing to commercially use the Dow Jones Indexes information to market investment products or for publication in the media, such as television and the Internet.

According to a Dow Jones presentation in Mumbai, socially responsible investing (SRI), including faith-based investing, accounts for US$4 trillion worth of assets under management, a figure growing 20% annually.

European SRI assets are worth nearly $1.75 trillion and such assets are worth $22 billion in the Asia-Pacific region, according to Dow Jones. "Historically, the increase of wealth within any population has resulted in an interest in ethical investing," the Dow Jones Dharma Investment presentation noted.

India's first SRI product was the ABN AMRO Sustainable Development Fund, launched in March 2007. The Dow Jones Dharma Index is the first major faith-based SRI product in India.

"Mid-to-long term, we expect products like funds, open-ended funds, index funds, certificates but also exchange-traded funds" to be potential investors to the index, said Nicole Wesch, from the Frankfurt office of Dow Jones.

The DJ Dharma India Index value will be updated daily with a quarterly review. "The review frequency of indexes depends on the use of the indexes," said Wesch. "For example, the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 is reviewed monthly and the Dow Jones Global Titans 50 is reviewed annually." Most Dow Jones indexes are reviewed quarterly.

The DJ Dharma Index aims to meet the needs of socially aware investors seeking to avoid companies with harmful practices, services or products. Environmental screening in the DJ Dharma Index will consider corporate performance on emissions, climate change and carbon footprint analysis, oil and chemical spills, waste management and recycling. Corporate governance filtering will involve labor relations and disputes and discrimination allegations, human-rights violations, working conditions and wages.

The launch of Dow Jones Dharma Indexes comes as stocks compliant with the Islamic code of conduct, or sharia, are attracting more attention worldwide, with the Islamic investment market estimated between $400 billion to $500 billion.

The 51 Dow Jones Islamic Market Indexes, the world's first faith-based ethical investment products, made their debut in 1999, with input from an independent advisory Sharia Supervisory Board with a member each from from Syria, Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Malaysia.

Data available from the Dow Jones Indexes website says the DJ Dharma India Index of 250 companies has a total market capitalization $919 billion, compared with $1.6 trillion among 415 companies in the Dow Jones Dharma Japan Index.

The DJ Dharma US Index features 1,065 companies with a total $5.3 trillion in market capitalization. The full list of companies in the Dharma Indexes is made available only to their licensees, which denies an independent chance to verify how accurate their filtering mechanisms are.

For instance, the Indian companies Dow Jones gave out as examples in their Dharma India Index - ICICI Bank Ltd, Larsen & Toubro Ltd, Infosys Technologies Ltd, Housing Development Finance Corp and Bharti Airtel Ltd - did not include any units of the $70.3 billion Tata Group, India's most respected corporate house, India's largest corporate taxpayer and among the world's most socially responsible companies.

Philanthropic trusts own about 66% equity capital of Tata Sons, the primary promoter, making Tata Group possibly the largest corporate group of its kind in the world where the majority shareholder is Messrs Compassion and Charity.

"Until now, faith-based investing has been restricted to Islamic and Christian religions only," Nitesh Gor, chief executive of Dharma Investments, told the media. "But 20% of the world population consists of dharmic religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. The idea [of the Dow Jones Dharma Indexes] is to promote faith-based investing through dharmic religion."

The word dharma in the ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit and in Pali dhamma has vast connotations that defies exact translation into English, but the primary meaning is "universal laws of nature" without any sectarian divisions.

Dow Jones Indexes acknowledges that dharma or dhamma is a "spiritual concept central to the many religions originating in South Asia, including Hinduism, the Buddha's non-sectarian teachings, Jainism, and Sikhism."

The Dharma Index subscribes to the core of all spiritual thought originating in India: non-violence, respect for all forms of life, compassion and loving kindness.

The investment potential for the so-called faith-based investment products following a moral code of conduct is particularly big in India and offers a combination of the country's ancient spiritual riches with new-found economic wealth.

India, after millennia, is seeing a resurgence in the teachings of the Buddha, not least in the increasingly widespread practice of Vipassana meditation. For the growing hundreds of thousands of Vipassana practitioners from all religions, including those from the business community for whom brief but intense workshops are available in numerous centers throughout the world, products such as the Dow Jones Dharma index make for easier choices on how to incorporate non-sectarian, practical self-realization into their daily lives.

Many leading Indian businessmen are serious practitioners of Vipassana, including media baron Subash Chandra Goel, owner of Zee Television, Asia's leading Hindi satellite channel. Companies such as the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation of India and Indian Railways offer paid leave for senior officials and other employees to take Vipassana courses.

In Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, the government training center in Pune city for senior Indian Administrative Service officers, the Yeshwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration, offers Vipassana courses as part of the curriculum.

Mumbai, India's busiest and most workaholic city, always finds time for investing in spiritual health. A long queue can invariably be found even on mornings of working days outside the famous Siddhivinayak Temple to Lord Ganesha, the deity for enterprises. Christians in the city drop into churches during the mid-day break and Friday prayers in mosques are well attended. In the miserably crowded suburban trains, many commuters quietly read prayer books or sing bhajans (devotional songs).

Faith-based investing in India took off with the world's first online sharia compliant online brokerage that opened in November 2007. Parsoli Corporation Limited, a Mumbai-based brokerage with a market capitalization of $25 million, launched Stockmultiplier.co.in, an online trading facility following the sharia, the life code of conduct, that forbids investing in businesses relating to alcohol, gambling, pornography and entertainment and those earning high income only from interest, such as financial institutions and commercial banks.

The company's Parsoli Islamic Equity Index tracks sharia-compliant stocks from listed equities in India's stock exchanges. "The response was overwhelming barely two days after we opened," Parsoli chief executive Jafar Sareshwala told Asia Times Online. "We received over 700 enquiries of which about 20% were non-Muslims. The idea of making money with clean investments appeals to a lot of people.''

The growth of Asian economies has helped to set the stage for the present concerns with investments anchored in religious values, according to Nitesh Gor of Dharma Investments, speaking at the Mumbai launch of the Dow Jones Dharma India Index.

"India and Asia have made remarkable advances economically over the last few years and in parallel we believe that bringing our religious values onto the global stage offers sustainable solutions to the problems facing the world today," he said.

The Dow Jones Dharma India Index is to be screened by three committees of academicians and religion practitioners - the academic advisory committee, a dharma supervisory committee and a religious council providing guidance and establishing the principles for the methodology.

Advisors include faculty members from Harvard University, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Britain's Oxford Center for Hindu Studies and the Oxford Center for Buddhist Studies, Yokohama University, Japan, Columbia University in the US, Thammasat University, Bangkok, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. such as the venerable monks Dr Ashin Nyanissara, chancellor of Sitagu International Buddhist Academy, Myanmar, and Religious figures involved includethe venerable Sangharaja, the patriarch of Cambodia, chief spiritual advisor to the king of Cambodia.

SRI evaluation clearly can be subjective, and what passes the SRI test for some fails for others. For instance, the Mumbai-based RO Somani Charitable Trust published its Karmayog corporate social responsibility ratings on January 4, with what it called India's first corporate social responsibility ratings of India's largest 500 companies based on sales.

"The results of the Karmayog CSR rating are extremely disappointing," the survey declared, "with no company meriting the highest five rating and with 46% of companies condemned with the lowest zero rating ... The only four companies with a four out of five rating were HDFC, Infosys Technologies, Tata Steel and Titan Industries."

Deep foundations for the future: Catholicism in Cambodia

Thu, 2006-02-09 19:11 — ABN

This is a good article, especially for American Buddhists as it may help us see some Buddhist issues from a new perspective. Quote: "He doesn't see Buddhism as offering relief. People perceive Buddha and Jesus very differently, he says. Our God is very close to us. He is our father and our friend. In Buddhism, you find the opposite. Buddha is very high, very far away from us. Jesus comes to encounter us. But with Buddha, they must go to Buddha may also help to dispell undue idealism about Asian social conditions and/or Buddhism as it is actually practiced and perceived in its traditional contexts. ABN

02/09/2006 Kristen Hannum
SIEM REAP, Cambodia: A runny-eyed cat prowls among the early worshipers praying before Mass at the Catholic church here. They sit, cross-legged on straw mats, distracted by a young man who is trying to fix a complaining fan. He finally turns it off.

The church fills with Japanese, Korean and Filipino tourists and residents, Cambodian families, schoolgirls dressed in white shirts and long blue skirts. There are veiled women religious dressed in grey habits, and three Missionaries of Charity "Mother Teresa" Sisters.

When Father Pedro Gomez, a Jesuit from Colombia, celebrates the Mass, he kneels behind the low altar. His homily is filled with Khmer sentences that end in "bat" the Khmer word for "yes" as said by men, a polite form of speech that seeks to persuade rather than bully.

The scents of flowers and incense in the church mingle with kitchen smells of frying garlic, wafting in through the open, latticed windows.

After Mass, Father Gomez greets worshipers on the front porch. He speaks in Khmer, Spanish and English, and often makes the humble Cambodian's lotus blossom gesture by bringing his palms together and bowing. It means peace and sanctity, and brings to mind compassion and the love of Jesus, he says.

Father Gomez, in Cambodia since 2000, usually works in the provincial capital and apostolic seat of Battambang. The range of his ministry (which began with English lessons in Toronto, so that he could learn Khmer, since there is no Spanish-Khmer dictionary) includes finding rural youngsters room and board at secondary school, catechism for children and adults, an agricultural assistance program, and teaching nonviolence.

In Battambang, 10 priests serve 7,000 Catholics, a majority of whom are Vietnamese. Many are fisherfolk on the Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia. These Catholics worship in floating wooden churches on the lake, speak Vietnamese and grumble that Khmer has been made the liturgical language of Cambodia.

We are trying to make the Church inculturated here, says Father Gomez.

Catholicism first came to Cambodia with Portuguese trading ships in the 1500s. A few Catholics from Japan and Indonesia arrived in Cambodia in the 1600s, fleeing persecution in their own countries. The largest influx, however, came in the 1800s, when Cambodia became a French colony. The French brought Vietnamese administrators and soldiers with them, many of whom were Catholic.

Vietnam and the Vietnamese were so dominant that French missionaries of the Pontifical Missions Etrangères de Paris coming to Cambodia would typically learn Vietnamese, not Khmer. Catholicism was effectively a Vietnamese and French religion in Cambodia.

That is still the view of many Cambodians: Catholicism is not only a foreign religion, it is a foreign religion associated with their ancient enemy, the Vietnamese.

In response, the bishops say that the Church must serve the Vietnamese Catholics in Cambodia, but also encourage them to learn Khmer and do their part in making peace. Battambang's Apostolic Prefect Enrique Figaredo, better known as Bishop Kike, writes that Cambodia's Vietnamese must integrate themselves into a culture that discriminates against them.

Father Gomez believes the Church offers gifts of grace to Cambodians, scarred by decades of violence. Their faces smile, but in their hearts there is violence, he says. Sometimes I am very surprised by their reactions. You see very strange things. Sometimes when people steal, they kill. Sometimes parents use violence when they speak to the young.

He doesn't see Buddhism as offering relief.

People perceive Buddha and Jesus very differently, he says. Our God is very close to us. He is our father and our friend. In Buddhism, you find the opposite. Buddha is very high, very far away from us. Jesus comes to encounter us. But with Buddha, they must go to Buddha.

There are similarities, Father Gomez acknowledges. Both faiths offer everlasting life. But the way there is very different. Buddhism's wheel of life is something to escape; mistakes and wrong actions throw a person into lifetimes of punishment. For us, it's more about God's love, although our deeds are also very important.

Father Gomez says that although Cambodians are culturally Buddhist, there's an emptiness inside. Buddhism here is just a tradition.

The Khmer Rouge killed most of Cambodia's 65,000 Buddhist monks; soldiers also destroyed the temples and most of Cambodia's Buddhist literary works.

Some of the worst of the Khmer Rouge criminals have decided that Christianity offers a more hopeful eternal future than Buddhist atonement through infinite reincarnations.

Khmer Rouge warlords in Pailin, a city southwest of Battambang on the Thai border, have become millionaires via illegal logging, casinos and gem mines, smuggling the gems past corrupt border agents on both the Thai and Cambodian sides. Some of those gem mines, like scenes from hell in Lord of the Rings, are right in Pailin, as are four evangelical churches with booming congregations. Jason Burke of the Observer newspaper, quoted one pastor who said 70 percent of the converts in Pailin are Khmer Rouge.

When I was a soldier I did bad things. I don't know how many we killed. We were following orders and thought it was the right thing to do, Thao Tanh, 52, a former Khmer Rouge, told Burke. I read the Bible and know it will free me from the weight of the sins I have committed.

The notion of salvation for killers makes Ronnie Yimsut angry. Yimsut, an Oregonian, escaped Cambodia at the age of 15, after the Khmer Rouge killed his family.

Do keep in mind that sins created by men (and women) of the KR [Khmer Rouge] organization can never be erased, certainly not by becoming a Christian, not in this lifetime, he wrote in a letter to the Phnom Penh Post's editor. You have to pay the price for everything you do: then, now, and in the future, both good and bad.

Several years ago, Yimsut visited the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin, and wrote about that as well.

I felt very sorry for the destruction of native forest along both sides of the road. It became almost a barren landscape void of majestic rain forest, which stood here once. . . .

We later went into a Khmer Rouge-operated casino just 100 yards from the border. . . . Two, three, a thousand dollars equivalent were wagered by individual gambler in a single bet. I was amazed to see so much money being wagered at this remote and primitive jungle casino. . . . When a communist turns into a capitalist, he goes all the way out to the moon.

The best known of the former Khmer Rouge who has turned to Christianity is Duch, the former chief of the notorius Tuol Sleng torture and extermination center in Phnom Penh. There he oversaw the murders of 16,000 or more prisoners. Only seven are known to have survived.

Even so, the Cambodian regional chief of the Seventh Day Adventists told author Tom Fawthrop that he found Duch to be an inspirational figure. Even if he killed 16,000 or two million, if he confesses, the Lord accepts that,Rev. Daniel Walter said.

Some evangelicals have aggressively gone after Cambodians, through gifts of rice and promises of not only forgiveness in the hereafter, but miracles here and now.

In 1994, the Cambodian police safeguarded Texas Assembly of God preacher Mike Evans out of the country before mobs could seize him. Evans had promised miracles on hundreds of radio advertisements: the blind would see, the crippled would walk and the dead would rise again. Thousands of Cambodians traveled from across the country to fill a Phnom Penh stadium to hear his message.

The miracle cures failed to materialize, and Evans had to flee. Angry Cambodians returned Bibles, destroyed a church in Phnom Penh and sabotaged churches in the provinces.

Father Charlie Dittmeier, a Maryknoll missioner, knows the story, though it happened before he came to Cambodia. He says part of the problem for the Catholic Church here is that Cambodians rarely differentiate between Christian denominations. So when freewheeling enthusiasts such as Evans appear with harebrained schemes promising to raise the dead, they tarnish everyone.

That shouldn't be a surprise: how many Americans, after all, differentiate between Theravada Buddhism, as is practiced in Cambodia, and Mahayana Buddhism, prevalent in Vietnam?

Even those within the Catholic Church don't understand the differences, even though we explain them many times, says Father Gomez.

For me it's the same, says one woman apologetically, who has just attended the Mass.

Father Gomez says that although Protestant congregations are growing faster, they're not necessarily forming a lasting Christianity. Evangelicals from the United States, the Philippines and Korea, he says, go to villages, give rice, teach English, and after three months baptize.

It takes four years to become a Catholic in Battambang. Our goal is not to get many people, but rather people who truly believe, says Father Gomez.

A convert must come to a weekly study session for four years, first learning that the Church is community. That contrasts with Buddhism, where a person goes to the pagoda and kneels and prays, but worships individually, rather than as part of a community, says the Colombian priest.

Bishop Kike has written that Cambodian Catholic communities today resemble Catholic communities on the early American frontier, where Catholic families organized prayer groups and counted themselves fortunate when a circuit riding priest stopped to say Mass in a living room, a makeshift space, or a newly built church.

Those under 18 aren't allowed to convert to Catholicism unless their family is converting. The priests instead tell young Cambodians to hold onto their Catholic faith, but don't create conflict.

Celibacy may impede the Church's ability to attract seminarians. Buddhist monks also pledge celibacy, but their commitment to religious life can be as brief as six months. Many pledge for five years. Short time, offers Father Gomez with a laugh. But with us it's a life commitment. A whole life!

Even so, the Catholic community in Battambang is growing. The Church works through social programs. “After that comes conversion, which is a fruit of the work we’re doing with the people,” says Father Gomez. “We don’t just go out and say, come and know Jesus.”

When the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, they slaughtered everyone in a Benedictine contemplative community, executed Khmer priests, and razed Phnom Penh’s cathedral. A group of Carmelite Sisters escaped to Vietnam.

Like everything else, from families to government, the Church has had to start over here in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero's destruction of Cambodian culture.

Among Western religious expelled by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 was Mission Etrangères de Paris Bishop Yves Ramousse, Phnom Penh's bishop. His ministry to Cambodians didn't end with his exile, however. The pope charged him with the pastoral care of Khmer Catholics worldwide. During those years, the French mission translated both the Bible and the liturgy into Khmer. They and other Catholic organizations and orders, including Catholic Relief Services and the Jesuits, worked in the refugee camps in Thailand. Bishop Kike, then a seminarian, was one of those working in the border camps.

In 1990, when the government legalized religion, a Catholic community began gathering in the Phnom Penh Caritas house. Caritas is the international relief agency of the Catholic Church. On Christmas, the government returned part of a former seminary to the community. The Khmer Rouge had used it as a jail, and it had then been used as a barracks. The Church bought back the rest of the seminary, and the complex became Phsar Tauch Parish.

During repairs on Phsar Tauch, a man fell from the roof and died clearly the work of a neak ta, folks around here said, a tree spirit angered by the removal of a spirit house that the Khmer troops had built to honor it.

Mission Etrang¨res de Paris Father Emile Destombes, who led the congregation, searched for a way to allay people's fears. Diocesan history records the outcome: A solution was found for Christmas: a house was built in its stead as a croche to be given away as well as others to the poor.

The neak ta, a bit like Irish fairies, are everywhere in Cambodia. The little spirit houses, built to honor them, sometimes have a human figure, sometimes a stone. They're territorial spirits, having to do with ancestors, fertility, weather and health and, says Norman Lewis, the travel writer, they reveal not only the Hindu influences on Cambodia from the earliest Khmer kingdoms, but also what has happened to both Hindu gods and the Khmer people.

Lewis, in the 1951 travel memoir, A Dragon Apparent, wrote that the neak ta eysaur and the neak ta en were in fact the Hindu gods Siva and Indra. Thus had the powerful Brahamical gods of the Khmer Empire shrunk and shriveled along with the Empire itself. And now they were no more than neak ta mere tree spirits to frighten babies with.

Bishop Ramousse officially returned to Phnom Penh in 1992, two years after the Cambodia government legalized religion, and in 1994, the Vatican established relations with the Kingdom of Cambodia.

In 1995, a Khmer priest was ordained, the first since 1975.

In 2001, Father Destombes became Phnom Penh's bishop.

There are now 19,000 Catholics in Cambodia; two-thirds are Vietnamese. There are only a handful of Khmer among the 50 priests, four seminarians and 60 religious.

It's very much an expatriate church, says Rich Balmadier, Cambodian head for Catholic Relief Services. They're all here on visas. All the Filipina sisters they'd be out if the government changed its mind. Everyone is here through the good graces of the government.

CRS in some ways works more closely with the government than with the dioceses. Balmadier has turned to Bishop Destombes a couple times for letters of support. But most of the time, his priorities are appropriately elsewhere, says Balmadier.

He says the Phnom Penh Diocesan offices have concentrated on pastoral work, which no one else is doing.

Many Catholic groups are in Cambodia working on medical, agricultural, and other development needs. It's a bit of the tail wagging the dog, with Catholic NGOs in place before there was a real Church, says Balmadier.

He saw a similar situation evolve in Chad, with independent religious orders arriving with their own separate funding streams. The bishop wasn't in charge, and at a point, he said, No. It took a lot of work to pull everything together. At the end, there was still plenty of room for initiative, but there was a diocesan plan. As the Church infrastructure builds, there will be more linkage here as well.

Ballmadier says the Cambodian Church's successes in rebuilding, in pastoral work, in outreach through radio and television have been phenomenal. Consider that in 1991, there was zero because in 1990, religion was still outlawed.”

Phsar Tauch remains Phnom Penh's only parish, with two Khmer Masses every weekend; a French Mass on the first and third Saturdays.

The Phnom Penh Maryknoll Community, at the bishop's request, is responsible for the weekly English-language Mass, a spirited celebration that takes place in the auditorium of the buttoned-down Russian Cultural Center.

It's standing-room-only, with the international community crowded into the big, bright room: Women in saris, Africans, Westerners, Indonesians, Filipinos and Koreans the crowd is young, with dozens of families.

Father Dittmeier says that if ever a person wanted to drop out of their Catholic worship commitments, Cambodia would be the place to do it. What's special about the English Mass, he says, is its intentionality. People are here because they want to be.

It's easy to pick out the buzz-headed Marines from the U.S. embassy, says Father Dittmeier, who once did a double-take over a couple of saffron-robed Buddhist monks sitting in the front row, singing the communion hymn along with everyone else.

Father Dittmeier has been told there are only five Jews in all of Cambodia. They come here, too, he says.

So even though it's a Catholic liturgy, there are any number of Lutherans, Methodists, Orthodox and all varieties of Christian grateful for the chance to meet in community to worship God.

The music is contemporary and upbeat, with guitars, a synthesizer and a Philippine choir, singing in parts.

Enme Malanog, from the Philippines, says she likes the service. We come from a Catholic country, this helps both with homesickness and to spread the Word.

Source of this article