EWTN News portal reports that on June 13, 2026, Cambodia’s Buddhist leadership conferred the high honorary title “Akka Mahāupāsakabuddhasāsanūpatthambhakr” — “Elder Great Lay Supporter and Upholder of the Buddha’s Dispensation” — upon Bishop Olivier Schmitthaeusler, apostolic vicar of Phnom Penh, during a ceremony at Wat Botum Vatey in the Cambodian capital. The title was conferred by Supreme Patriarch Nun Nget of Cambodia’s Mohanikaya Buddhist order and presented by Venerable Khim Sorn, the order’s third deputy supreme patriarch. The article presents this event as a heartwarming gesture of interreligious harmony, quoting Buddhist leaders on Cambodia’s constitutional framework that recognizes Buddhism as the state religion while “guaranteeing complete freedom of religious belief without coercion” and promoting “religious harmony, peaceful coexistence, and mutual respect among the different religions.” Bishop Schmitthaeusler himself declared: “Receiving the status of Akka Mahāupāsakabuddhasāsanūpatthambhakr today is a moment of profound recognition of how the Catholic Church and Buddhism walk hand-in-hand for the common good of our people and our country,” and further stated: “This is a powerful signal: when religions journey together, the world will witness true peace.” The article notes that the Catholic Church in Cambodia numbers barely 20,000 faithful out of a population of roughly 18 million Theravada Buddhists. This event is not a triumph of the faith — it is a textbook demonstration of how the post-conciliar ecumenical revolution has reduced the Catholic Church’s missionary mandate to a program of interreligious flattery, mutual congratulation, and the abandonment of Christ’s exclusive claim to be “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
The Dogmatic Reality the Article Dares Not Mention
The article presents this Buddhist honor as an unambiguously positive development, a milestone in “cooperation” and “dialogue.” Nowhere does it mention — because the conciliar establishment has spent six decades systematically suppressing this truth — that the Catholic Church has always and infallibly taught that she alone possesses the fullness of revealed truth, and that all non-Christian religions are, objectively speaking, false systems of belief that lead souls away from the one true God.
Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned as error Proposition 16: “Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation,” and Proposition 17: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.” These are not optional theological opinions — they are infallible condemnations. The Council of Florence (1442) taught with binding authority: “The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life everlasting; but that they will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless before death they are joined with Her.”
Cambodia’s 18 million Buddhists are, in the language of sacred theology, infideles — those who have never received the grace of faith in Jesus Christ. Buddhism, in its essential doctrines of anatta (no-self), samsara (cyclical rebirth), and nirvana (extinction of individual consciousness), is fundamentally incompatible with the Catholic faith in the immortal soul, the reality of a personal Creator God, the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, and the Redemption through the Precious Blood of Christ. To describe the Catholic Church and Buddhism as entities that “walk hand-in-hand for the common good” is to deny the most elementary missionary obligation of the episcopate. The article’s silence on this point is not accidental — it is the fruit of six decades of conciliar catechetical sabotage.
The Ecumenical Heresy Codified at Vatican II and Celebrated in Phnom Penh
Bishop Schmitthaeusler’s effusive gratitude for a Buddhist honor is entirely consistent with the teaching of the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate (1965), which declared: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.” This document — condemned by every pre-conciliar pontiff who addressed the question — effectively declared that false religions contain “rays of truth” and are legitimate paths of spiritual development.
The article quotes Bishop Schmitthaeusler saying: “We know that when Cambodia is full of peace, it radiates a positive influence to the rest of the world… when religions journey together, the world will witness true peace.” This is the language of Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II declaration on religious freedom, which Pius XI had explicitly condemned in Quas Primas when he wrote that states have the duty to publicly honor Christ and obey Him, and that rulers must recognize that “the entire government of public schools… should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority” is an error (Syllabus, Proposition 45). Pius XI taught in Quas Primas: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men” — and that association must be ordered under the Kingship of Christ, not under a regime of “religious harmony” that treats the true God and idols as equal partners.
The pre-conciliar teaching is unambiguous. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei (1885), declared: “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each supreme in its own kind, and each restricted within certain limits defined by its own nature and special object.” The conciliar sect has replaced this with a model in which the Church “journeys together” with false religions, seeking not the conversion of their adherents but “the common good” — a naturalistic, horizontal goal that entirely omits the supernatural end of every human soul: eternal salvation through Jesus Christ and His one true Church.
The Linguistic Camouflage of Apostasy
The article’s language deserves careful scrutiny. The title conferred upon Schmitthaeusler — “Elder Great Lay Supporter and Upholder of the Buddha’s Dispensation” — is not a neutral honorific. It is a Buddhist ecclesiastical title that places the recipient within the hierarchical framework of Buddhist religious life. To accept such a title is to position oneself as a lay supporter of the Buddhasāsana — the dispensation, teaching, or religious system of Buddha. No Catholic bishop who understood his office would accept a title that implies he is an upholder of a false religious dispensation. Yet the article presents this as a gesture of admirable openness.
The article repeatedly employs the vocabulary of the conciliar revolution: “cooperation,” “dialogue,” “mutual respect,” “religious harmony,” “social cohesion,” “common good.” These are the stock phrases of the post-conciliar ecumenical lexicon — a lexicon designed to obscure the fundamental incompatibility of the Catholic faith with all false religions. The word “conversion” appears nowhere in the article. The word “mission” appears only in reference to Schmitthaeusler’s membership in the Paris Foreign Missions Society — an order that was founded precisely for the purpose of converting pagans to the Catholic faith, not for building roads to pagodas and funding Buddhist schools where students study Pali and Sanskrit.
Bishop Schmitthaeusler is quoted as saying he supported the establishment of a primary school at Wat Ang Montrey, “where students study Pali, Sanskrit, and other academic subjects.” Pali is the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism; Sanskrit is the classical language of Hindu sacred texts. A Catholic bishop using resources to support the study of pagan religious languages in a Buddhist temple — this is not “cooperation.” It is the abdication of the missionary mandate. The first and most essential duty of a bishop, as defined by the Council of Trent, is the cura animarum — the care of souls — which means above all the salvation of souls through preaching the Gospel, administering the sacraments, and bringing the lost into the one true Church. Every dollar spent on a Buddhist school is a dollar not spent on the conversion of Cambodia to Jesus Christ.
The “Small Minority” Argument and the Khmer Rouge Context
The article notes that the Catholic Church in Cambodia was “nearly wiped out during the Khmer Rouge era” and has “gradually rebuilt” to a community of about 20,000 faithful. This historical context is deployed implicitly to justify the conciliar approach: the Church is so small, so fragile, so dependent on the goodwill of the Buddhist majority, that it must pursue “cooperation” rather than confrontation. This is the logic of survivalism, not the logic of faith.
The martyrs of the Khmer Rouge era — and there were Catholic martyrs during that period — did not die so that their successors could accept honorary titles from Buddhist patriarchs. They died professing the faith of the one true God against an ideology that sought to destroy all religion. The article’s framing of the Church’s post-Khmer Rouge reconstruction in terms of “education, health care, social services, and pastoral ministry” — with no mention of conversion, baptism, or the supernatural life of grace — reveals the thoroughly naturalistic and humanitarian character of the conciliar Church’s mission. This is the “cult of man” condemned by Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), where he identified the Modernist error of reducing religion to social action and subjective religious experience rather than objective supernatural truth.
The Silence About Supernatural Realities
Perhaps the most damning feature of the article — and of the event it describes — is the complete absence of any supernatural reference. There is no mention of the Blessed Sacrament, no mention of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, no mention of the sacrament of baptism, no mention of the state of grace, no mention of the final judgment, no mention of the eternal destiny of souls. The entire narrative is conducted on a purely naturalistic plane: roads, schools, humanitarian aid, pandemic relief, border tensions, “peacebuilding and reconciliation.”
This silence is not merely an oversight. It is the defining characteristic of the conciliar religion — a religion that has effectively abandoned the supernatural order in favor of a horizontal, humanitarian, social-gospel model that is indistinguishable from secular philanthropy. When Bishop Schmitthaeusler says that “when religions journey together, the world will witness true peace,” he is proclaiming a lie. True peace is not the product of interreligious dialogue. As Pius XI taught in Quas Primas: “The peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ.” There is no peace outside the Kingdom of Christ, and the Kingdom of Christ is not a partnership between the true Church and false religions — it is the sovereign reign of the Incarnate Word over all creation, including all nations, all rulers, and all religious systems.
The Constitutional Framework of Religious “Freedom”
The article quotes Venerable Khim Sorn pointing to Cambodia’s constitutional framework, which recognizes Buddhism as the state religion while “guaranteeing complete freedom of religious belief without coercion.” This arrangement — a state religion combined with constitutional religious liberty — is precisely the model condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 77): “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.” The pre-conciliar teaching is clear: when possible, the Catholic Church should be recognized as the sole religion of the state, and the exercise of false religions should be restricted, not because of intolerance, but because error has no rights, and the state has a duty to uphold truth.
The article’s uncritical celebration of Cambodia’s “religious freedom” framework reveals the extent to which the conciliar establishment has not merely tolerated but actively embraced the liberal principle of religious indifferentism — the idea that all religions are equally legitimate and that the state’s role is to guarantee their peaceful coexistence. This is the error that Pope Gregory XVI condemned in Mirari Vos (1832) as “absurd and erroneous propositions” that lead to “the destruction of the salutary discipline of religion and the overthrow of the social order.”
Conclusion: The Abomination of Ecumenical Cooperation
The conferral of a Buddhist honorary title upon a Catholic bishop is not a minor diplomatic courtesy. It is a sacramental — in the pagan sense — act that symbolizes the complete inversion of the Church’s missionary mandate. Instead of converting Buddhists to Christ, the bishop has allowed himself to be absorbed into the Buddhist religious hierarchy as a “lay supporter” of the Buddha’s dispensation. Instead of preaching the Gospel, he has built roads and funded Buddhist schools. Instead of seeking the salvation of souls, he has sought “social cohesion” and “the common good.”
This is the inevitable fruit of the conciliar revolution. When the Church denies her own exclusive claim to truth — as Vatican II effectively did — she has no reason to convert anyone to anything. She becomes a social service agency, a diplomatic actor, a partner in “dialogue” with religions that her own solemn teaching declares to be false and spiritually deadly. The 20,000 Catholics of Cambodia deserve a bishop who will preach Christ crucified to the 18 million Buddhists of that country — not one who accepts honors from Buddhist patriarchs and speaks of “journeying together” toward a peace that can only come from the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam — not the glory of interreligious harmony.
Source:
Cambodia's Buddhist leaders honor Catholic bishop for decades of cooperation (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 23.06.2026