Interchange · GIA Publications

From Baroque, to AI Spring: God's Ongoing Creation

December 2, 2025·1 hr 16 min·7 clips

Ricky Manalo unravels why Filipinos sing the Gloria during Advent in Simbang Gabi, tracing it back to Baroque sensibilities.

The welcome feels like Interchange right away. Kate Williams starts with music and liturgy, then lets Father Ricky Manalo show up as composer, author, educator, and priest. Travel is part of the texture. He is speaking from the Paulist Fathers' Motherhouse in New York City after a year that took him to Europe, Australia, and Singapore. Even that becomes family talk, as he jokes that the best part of all the travel is the mileage he can pass along to relatives. Then the episode tightens. Manalo looks back to the early 1990s, when requests from the Bishops Conference pushed him to take Asian-American Catholic life more seriously. He does not dress it up as instant expertise. He admits, with some embarrassment, that he had not grown up paying close attention to that world beyond music, so the invitations forced him to learn in a more deliberate way. That gives the conversation its best shape. Formation here is not a credential. It is questions, documents, communities, and needs slowly changing the person asked to respond. Simbonga Bia becomes the center of the story. Manalo connects it to Filipino Catholic practice and describes a nine-day novena that grew through local leadership and diocesan support. Chicago matters a lot in that memory. He names Terry Naval as a matriarchal figure for the Filipino community and says the Chicago Archdiocese became a national model for Simbonga Bia. The scale lands: roughly 150 parishes involved, spread across the days of the novena so the celebration could move through the archdiocese. The ending turns prayerful, gathering the conversation into Christ, scripture, symbols, human development, art, healing, unity, and the hope of singing lives back to God.

As heard by us

A patient conversation linking liturgy, culture, and music without hurrying the point.

Ricky Manalo and Kate Williams make an easy, careful conversation out of a subject that could have felt cramped. The early stretch is light on its feet, then it gets more specific once Manalo talks about learning Asian-American Catholicism more deliberately after his work with…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want liturgy talk that lands in Asian-American Catholic life.

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