PERTH, WA: December 5, 1991
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Power of prayer The scene at Aquinas College last Friday evening when nearly 2000 people heard Sister Briege McKenna tell of her personal healing and urge people to have strong devotion to the eucharist. After the Mass which prayed for healing the Blessed Sacrament was carried through the crowds by Vincentian Father Kevin Scalton who along with Sister Briege had just conclud •d a five-day retreat with 80 bishops and priests.
Dossier on faitlifti PHNOM PENH: The Cambodian Catholic Church has risen from the dead but the government is watching it closely.
Officials monitor services and want to know how many worship and the details of Sunday sermons. But it is better than the bolted doors behind
"It is supervised liberty," says Father Emule Destombes the first Western priest lobe allowed to say Mass since the Khmer Rouge devestated the Church after 1975.
There were five Cambodian priests, including two bishops, when the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh. All had been killed or had disappeared by the time Vietnam invaded just before Christmas 1978 to overthrow the regime.
The Khmer Rouge annihilated Camobida's Catholic clergy as "valets of imperialism".
Cambodia's 10 nuns also fell victim to the pogrom.
which a handful dared pray for a decade.
Cambodia had 5000 Catholics before the Khmer Rouge reign of terror, in which 1million peopled died. The number now stands at 3000, of whom 750 live in Phnom Penh, Father Destombes said.
At a late Sunday afternoon Mass, more than 1000 Catholics crowded into a church housed in the dormitory of Phnom
Penh's former Catholic seminary. Cambodia's Catholic Church had been homeless since the Frenchbuilt cathedral that towered over central Phnom Penh in the days of French colonial rule was razed by the Khmer Rouge. Not a stone was left standing. Even after the Vietnamese communists took
over, the handful of Catholics had to pray behind locked doors. The first public service was at Easter 1990 when the country's Catholics were allowed to gather at a movie theatre. After months of pleading the government finally gave Catholics one-third of the former seminary. Their first Mass in a place of their
own was celebrated last December. Up to 1000 people now crowd into one of the seminary's former dormitories. But the government wants the names and addresses of all church leaders. Father Destombes gives all information except the Sunday Sermon.