Manuel Francisco

FRANCISCO, Manuel (‘Manoling’). b. Quezon City, Philippines, 26 Oct 1965. Educated at the Ateneo de Manila High School, he grew up playing keyboard, and trained for a career in classical piano. After his uncle, his mother’s first cousin, Benigno Aquino, was killed in 1983, Francisco became a student activist. At the age of 20, while in his second year in college, he entered the Jesuit Novitiate in Novaliches. Ordained in 1997, his first assignment was as a priest and school director of an Ifugao tribal community (in the Cordillera Mountains in Northern Philippines). The Cordillera area, known as the Philippine Mountain Provinces, successfully resisted Spanish colonial rule, and therefore...