Roman Catholic dioceses

While I focus on the civil subdivisions in this blog, there are more divisions of the country. The Roman Catholic church has a very formal territorial organization into ecclesiastical provinces, dioceses, and down to parishes. Probably the best website dealing with these subdivisions worldwide is Catholic Hierarchy, with updates posted in a special blog almost daily.

The Catholic Church in Thailand is a very minority church with only 0.5% of the population being catholic - the country is of course predominately Buddhist. But even though there are just about 300,000 Catholics in the country, the church has subdivided the country into two ecclesiastical provinces with ten dioceses altogether. Each of the diocese have one church designated as a cathedral, like the one of Ratchaburi depicted. Almost all of the diocese are aligned with the boundaries of the civil provinces, with one notable exception. The diocese of Chanthaburi is separated by the archdiocese of Bangkok by the Bang Pa Kong river, and also covers the whole Nakhon Nayok province except the district Ban Na. This oddity gets understandable when one checks the history of Nakhon Nayok province. The province was abolished in 1943, and Ban Na assigned to Saraburi, while the other districts were assigned to Prachinburi. The province was recreated in 1946. And in 1944, while the province did not exist, the apostolic vicariate of Chanthaburi was created, using the then existing civil boundaries. I only don't know why the Bang Pa Kong river was used as the boundary, maybe the elongated shape of Chachoengsao province and some catholic settlements west of the river were the root of this, but that's just my speculation.

Spelling reform

The Thai word for the districts (Amphoe) is usually spelled อำเภอ, using the relatively rare character pho sam-phao. However in some Royal Gazette entries in the 1940s it is spelled อำเพอ instead, using the character pho phan. Both characters are absolutely identical, having the same pronounce and belonging to the same consonant class, the only reason to have different letters is to spell words originally from Sanskrit or Pali according to their original spelling. There apparently was a spelling reform at that time trying to make these duplicate letters obsolete, however it was rather short-lived as the old spellings show up again.

Another word which changed spelling during this reform was the one for subdistrict (Tambon) - normally spelled ตำบล (notice the lo ling at end, pronounced as a "n"), which was then changed to ตำบน with the no nu at end. For me this spelling reform would have been nice, then it would be a little bit more easy to learn to read and write Thai without having to care about the special spellings for words from Sanskrit/Pali. Also the Thai numerals were completely exchanged with the arabic ones.

One example for an announcement with this different spelling is the abolishment of Nakhon Nayok Province, which took place in 1943. When the province was recreated in 1946 the spelling reform was already over as well. So apparently this reform was one of the actions of the first rule of Field Marshall Phibul Songkhram, who had to resign when it became apparent that the Japanese, with whom Thailand allied, will loose the World War.