The death of Fr Ponchaud, witness to Phnom Penh under the Khmer Rouge
A member of the Missions Étrangères de Paris, the clergyman died in France at the age of 85. In 1975, he was among the last foreigners to leave the country whose ideological shift he later recounted in "Cambodia: Year Zero", a book that became a point of reference for Pol Pot's regime. Back in Cambodia in 1993, he accompanied the rebirth of the Cambodian Church, also thanks to his translations of the Bible and catechisms in the local language.
Phnom Penh (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Fr François Ponchaud, a missionary who spent 56 years in Cambodia, died today at the age of 85 at the retirement home of the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MÉP), in Lauris, France.
Known around the world as a direct witness to the Khmer Rouge seizure of power in 1975, which forced him into exile, he wrote Cambodge année zéro (Cambodia: Year Zero), a key book on those tragic years that saw the extermination of up to 2.3 million Cambodians.
But Fr Ponchaud was also one of the protagonists in the laborious rebirth of Cambodia’s martyred Church in Southeast Asia, where he returned to carry out his ministry starting in 1993.
In Phnom Penh, the apostolic vicar, Bishop Olivier Schmitthaeusler, announced his death to the Cambodian Church this morning.
“Father François Ponchaud gave his entire life serving our Lord and the People of God as a missionary priest (for 60 years) in Cambodia since 1965!” writes the prelate. “We have gratitude for his work to translate the Bible, Council Vatican II, many official texts of the Catholic Church and prepared all books for catechesis, liturgy as well many seminars for catechists and faithful.”
Fr Ponchaud was born on 8 November 1939 in Sallanches in Haute-Savoie, writes Ad Extra, a missionary platform set up by the MÉP.
He came to the French missionary institute after serving in the French military as a paratrooper in Algeria for 28 months. Ordained a priest in 1964, he sailed to Cambodia the following year.
After the first years dedicated to the study of the Khmer language, he served the apostolic prefecture of Kampong Cham.
When the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, he was held up in the French embassy, and expelled a few days later, on 8 May, one of the last foreigners to leave Cambodia.
He published Cambodge année zéro in France in 1977, which was translated into eight languages, revealing to the world the horror of the Khmer Rouge regime.
By monitoring official speeches on the radio, Fr Ponchaud decoded the objectives pursued by the revolution: the organisation of the new society, the ideological education of the people, and the "creation of a new culture at the painful cost in terms of blood that everyone would later discover.
Even in his years of exile, he never stopped visiting Cambodian refugees in France, Europe, the United States, and Thailand. He was finally able to return to Cambodia in 1993, after the Paris Peace Agreements (1991) and the end of the Vietnamese occupation, resuming his pastoral work.
From 2016 to 2021, before returning to France due to age and poor health, he retired to a small rural parish, dividing his time between spiritual and cultural activities.
One of his works, La cathédrale de la rizière (available in English as The Cathedral of the Rice Paddy), describes 450 years of history of the Church in Cambodia.
In Southeast Asian country, he also founded the Cambodian Catholic Cultural Centre to teach the Khmer language and culture to young missionaries and volunteers to better serve the Cambodian people.
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