by Alessandra De Poli

Sister Marie and Sister Teresa brought new life to the congregation of the Lovers of the Cross in Kompong Cham after the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. As they say in their testimony, their journey began in the 1990s, and went hand in hand with the country’s reconstruction.

 

Milan (AsiaNews) – Sister Marie and Sister Teresa are the first two Cambodians who brought religious life back after the fall of the Pol Pot regime through preaching of the Gospel in a market. Their story is also that of a Church reborn, featured in this month's issue of Mondo e Missione, the magazine published by PIME missionaries.

After the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, breathing fresh air in Cambodia was possible in the early  1990s. Marie, whose name before she was baptised was Ang Songvat, worked as a secretary in the mornings, and as a seamstress at the Kompong Cham market in the afternoons. She also attended evening classes to get her high school diploma, which had not been able to complete because of fighting involving armed guerrillas in some parts of the country.

At the market, she befriended a woman who would change her life, although she did not know that yet. This woman was Bun Nath, who sold fish with a colleague, Bun Tharin, and who had heard about Christianity thanks to a French priest before the missionaries were kicked out in 1975.

Bun Nath was only a child when she regularly visited the home of Fr André Lesouef, a member of the Foreign Missions of Paris, who in 1968 was appointed as the first apostolic prefect of Kompong Cham, capital of the homonymous province, located about 120 kilometres east of the country’s  capital Phnom Penh.

At the time, the clergyman welcomed non-Christian children at his rectory and talked to them. When he returned to Cambodia in 1992, all the works of the Catholic Church had been lost. Or so it seemed.

Bun Nath, now an adult, wrote a letter to the 70-year-old missionary, who lived in the capital Phnom Penh. Fr André not only managed to find her, but he baptised her, the first Christian in the reborn Cambodian Catholic Church.

Ath the market, Bun Nath spoke about her experience with Christianity, but the questions of the woman who would later become Sister Marie became increasingly complex.

So Bun Nath asked Bun Tharin to take Songvat to Fr André who was now assisted by two Thai nuns, Pélagie and Xavier, of the congregation of the Sisters Lovers of the Cross, an order founded in Thailand by Fr Lambert De la Motte in the 17th century.

Bun Tharin had met Fr André and heard about him from Bun Nath, but had never thought of converting to Christianity from Buddhism. She had finished middle school but then, due to her family’s economic hardships, had started to work at the fish market.

When she met the French missionary, Songvat did not really find the answers she was looking for, but was greeted with a question: "Do you want to study the Word of God?" asked Father André.

Following this meeting, the two women began separately to study the catechesis with the missionary. Between 1994 and 1996, when they were still under 30, they were baptised. Marie and Teresa are happy with their choice but it was not an easy decision.

"We were Buddhists by tradition, but I felt touched by the enlightenment of the Lord. Culture is something that you absorb from the outside, but the Word of God came to meet us during the journey,” said Sister Marie.

Because of Fr André’s increasingly poor health, Marie and Teresa continued the catechesis with the Thai sisters. "Their Khmer was rudimentary," they say. "But our faith was firm and motivated, it went beyond the formality of the lessons."

At one point, Sister Pélagie proposed to Marie to give evening sewing and writing lessons at her house to a group of girls not yet baptised. When Teresa also went to live with them, the two women began to think about consecration.

Fr André was taken aback by the request of the two women but understood that their vocation was genuine. Marie and Teresa had already decided to join the Sisters Lovers of the Cross because the charism of the congregation is simple, based on a Christianity of the earliest proclamation, based on the sharing of life.

Sisters Pélagie and Xavier brought to Cambodia a copy of the order’s constitutions in Thai, a language that Marie and Teresa learnt in order to translate into Khmer. To be sure that they had not misrepresented the content, they compared their translation with the French version.

And this is how the congregation put down roots in Cambodia again. Before the Khmer Rouse regime, there were other Sisters Lovers of the Cross but they were either killed or had fled abroad. This rebirth went hand in hand with the country’s reconstruction.

In 2002 they began their novitiate and in 2004 they made their first religious profession and were assigned to a mission in Prey Veng, where they were responsible for some student residences for girls and a programme of initiation into the Christian faith.

This is, more or less, what they are still doing today. Songvat stayed in Prey Veng, while Tharin lives in Stung Treng, north-eastern Cambodia, with nine other professed sisters.

Looking back at their lives, Sister Marie and Sister Teresa, who are now in their 60s, note that, after their baptism, they no longer performed traditional Buddhist religious rites with their family at festivals in pagodas. They could not understand why they were so different.

"At the time we did not know how to answer our own questions, but today,” they explain, “we understand that the Word asked to be proclaimed precisely in that particular context.”

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• cambodia
• kompong cham
• lovers of the cross
• sisters
• conversion
• buddhism
• khmer rouge
• killing fields