Notre-Dame Cathedral, Phnom Penh: destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, rebuilt fifty years later on a different site

In Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, the cathedral known as Notre-Dame, or Cathedral of Christ the King, was completed in 1927. That is the date given by the most reliable source found. It was French neo-Gothic, a style often compared to the cathedral of Reims, to a design attributed with less certainty to the architects Louis Chauchon, Maurice Masson and Henri Chatel. On 17 April 1975, the very day the Khmer Rouge entered the capital, the cathedral was, according to several independent sources, the first building in the city marked for destruction. It was pulled down stone by stone in the weeks that followed, the reinforced concrete broken with hammers and the iron taken away, according to the testimonies collected, «to make nails for the revolution». Only the bells survived, and are kept today at the National Museum of Cambodia. Sources differ on which government building stands today on the ground of the former cathedral, and this note avoids naming one with certainty. The French historian Henri Locard, citing the demographer Marek Sliwinski, estimates that of the roughly one hundred thousand Cambodian Catholics present in 1975, forty-nine per cent died, the highest rate of extermination among the religious groups of Cambodia according to this estimate. That figure is itself disputed, since other sources give a number of Catholics living in the country closer to twenty thousand already in 1972, and a separate encyclopedic entry speaks instead of two thirds of the Catholics dying in forced labour camps. Among the victims was Monsignor Joseph Chhmar Salas, the first Catholic bishop of Khmer origin, installed just before the Khmer Rouge took power, who died of exhaustion in a labour camp in 1977; the cause of beatification concerning him together with eleven companions closed in March 2026 and was sent to Rome. The apostolic vicariate of Cambodia was erected on 30 August 1850 and renamed apostolic vicariate of Phnom Penh on 3 December 1924. The present apostolic vicar is Olivier Michel Marie Schmitthaeusler, of the Paris Foreign Missions, since 2010, joined since 2025 by the coadjutor bishop Pierre Suon Hangly. Diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Cambodia were established on 25 March 1994, and no papal visit is recorded. The site of the old cathedral stayed empty for fifty years, until a new pro-cathedral dedicated to Saint Joseph, which blends the many-levelled roof of Khmer temples with a Latin cross plan, was completed on 15 February 2025 on different ground, that of a former seminary, at a cost of about three million dollars funded by donations from Cambodian, Thai and Vietnamese Catholics and by the Paris Foreign Missions.