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The Catholic Church in Cambodia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. Throughout the Church's history in Cambodia, Catholics made up a small percentage of the country's population, and a majority of adherents have been ethnically Vietnamese; in 2005, around two-thirds of the total number of Catholics in Cambodia were Vietnamese.[1][2]
The Church in Cambodia was slow to develop during the 20th century, with the first native Cambodian priest being ordained in 1957, and was nearly destroyed by the Khmer Rouge's severe communist rule which banned the practice of religion. Beginning in the 1990s, the institution was gradually rebuilt with the reestablishment of a major seminary and the first ordination of a native priest in decades.