PHNOM PENH (UCAN): The Catholic Church in Cambodia has concluded the diocesan enquiry, moving ahead with the canonization process of 12 Catholics, including the first Khmer Bishop Joseph Salas, who died during the Khmer Rouge rule after refusing to flee.
The men died between 1970 and 1979.
“They are priests, missionaries, religious, and lay people. They are the People of God and represent in a special way all those who suffered, who died praying the Lord to welcome them into his Kingdom, ” Bishop Olivier Schmitthaeusler, the apostolic vicar of Phnom Penh, said on March 18.
The conclusion of the inquiry, which resulted in a 3,000-page report, supports the Church’s request for the saintly men to be declared ‘venerable,” the next step in canonisation.
“These pages tell the story of Cambodia from 1970 to 1977; they are an incomparable testimony of faith for the new generations of baptized Christians of Cambodia,” Bishop Schmitthaeusler said.
“We thank God for all the years of investigation, evaluation of testimonies and documents, which today culminated in a report of almost 3,000 pages,” he said at a Mass marking the conclusion of the diocesan inquiry.
The Khmer Rouge, a radical group of communists that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, killed up to two million—including almost half of the country’s then 100,000 Catholics— by execution or extermination in forced labor camps.
Bishop Schmitthaeusler recalled that Pope Francis had approved the start of the canonization process.
The process officially began its diocesan phase on 15 May 2015, in Tangkok, a place dedicated to the memory of Cambodian martyrs.
He also praised Bishop Yves Ramousse, the French missionary who played a critical role in the history of the Church in Cambodia, leading it through the bloody years of the Khmer Rouge and overseeing its rebirth in the 1990s. He was the apostolic vicar of Phnom Penh from 1962 to 1976 and from 1992, just after the UN sent peacekeepers in, until 2001.
Schmitthaeusler called Bishop Yves “a companion to all these martyrs mentioned in our list, but also to all those who died in the silence and indifference of the world.”
There are now an estimated 20,000 Catholics in the country of almost 18 million people.
