Source link : https://news7.asia/news/francois-ponchaud-missionary-priest-in-cambodia-has-died/
Father François Ponchaud in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), January 9, 2016. JOHN VINK/ MAGNUM PHOTOS FOR “LE MONDE” History has lost a witness, and Cambodia a friend. François Ponchaud, French missionary priest, the man who revealed to the world the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge, died on January 17 in Lauris (Vaucluse), the retirement home of the fathers of the Foreign Missions of Paris, where he had been withdrawn since his return to France in 2021. In the small Asian kingdom of Cambodia, Father Ponchaud remained a free voice, a virulent critic of the regime of Prime Minister Hun Sen, denouncing the rapacity of Cambodian leaders as the action of Westerners. Before being a man of faith, François Ponchaud was a man of languages. The complex alphabets and the subtleties of foreign idioms were, for him, so many keys to understanding the thought of his ancestors as well as that of his neighbor. Born on February 8, 1939 in Sallanches (Haute-Savoie), into a family of Christian Democratic farmers, he truly immersed himself in religion by learning Latin, Greek and Hebrew at the minor seminary. And when, as a young adult, he joined the Foreign Missions of Paris, it was already with the idea of becoming a priest in Asia, inspired by the example of Father André Mabboux, another priest from Sallanches who left for the Far East – and having, for this, learned Mandarin, Thai and Laotian. You have 85.75% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
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Author : News7
Publish date : 2025-01-18 02:41:54
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