When 22-year-old seminarian Kenneth Rey Parsad took to the podium at Manila Cathedral, to sing the responsorial psalm for the Holy mass that Pope Francis celebrated last Friday, his heart was pounding wildly against his chest. “It’s hard to describe the feeling,” Ken begins.
“I had to tell myself: ‘Contain yourself!’ Imagine the Pope was just there. I had mixed feelings. My heart was pounding. Good thing it stopped when I got to the podium. Then I relaxed.” Then he sang the Responsorial Psalm, “Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord,” and stumped everyone.
He is the handsome young man people couldn’t stop talking about on
social media. His good looks coupled with his velvety tenor voice
quickly turned him into an instant
Internet sensation.
The dark-haired Abra-native says he was equally stumped with the attention he received. “I never expected it,” he smiles embarrassed. Apart from all the articles written about him and the Twitter shoutouts, the Enrique-Iglesias look-alike was also flooded with Facebook friend requests and messages. “Somebody even made me a Facebook page, but I told him to remove it already because it was too self-serving. Remember what Pope Francis said: 'humility,'” he shares with Coconuts Manila in an exclusive interview Monday afternoon.
There’s one story though that he enjoyed a lot: “Somebody wrote a satire! It says, because of the Papal visit, a theologian became a movie star. The title of my teleserye with Marian Rivera is, ‘Forgive me Father for I have sinned.’ In fairness, I laughed hard with that one.”
Ken admits “it feels good” but he’s also quick to say that the attention is also kind of scary. “There will be a lot of expectations now,” he continues. Apart from the social media love, inaccurate stories about him have begun floating in the Internet. He points to one biography that made his life sound like a fairy tale. “I only have one sibling but in that story, though it was a good story, it said we were three. It’s also scary because of all the temptation, to be egotistical and to focus on myself.”
Kenneth Rey Parsad is the eldest and the only boy of two kids. Born and raised in Bangued, Abra, the seminarian came to Manila seven years ago to pursue priesthood at the UST Central Seminary. There, he immediately saw photos of Pope John Paul II in the hallways. “I wondered, ‘how does it feel like to serve the Pope?" he says. He’d have his answer seven years later, when in October 2014, he was approached to sing the Psalm for the Holy Father.
“I’ve been singing psalms for big masses for a long time already,” Ken says in Tagalog. ‘So I’m friends with the liturgists and the music people already.” It was the head of music in Manila Cathedral who told him first about the job, a proposition he thought was “too good to be true.” The reality only sunk in when Fr. Carmelo Arada, Jr, the head of ministry of lectors and commentators, repeated the request: 'you will sing it.’”
They only had a grand total of two rehearsals, but Ken, ever so diligent, would practice by himself. “This is not from St. Agustin, but the quote is attributed to him: ‘When you sing well, you pray twice.’ So for me, when I sing and I give my best, it’s like I’m praying twice.”
Read the complete story and view more photos at the
Coconuts Manila website.
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
