In several Chinese Filipino Catholic parishes in Manila, devotional practices surrounding Chinese New Year extend beyond the liturgy into ritual engagements with ancestors, saints, and sacred objects. On the eve of the feast, parishioners present offerings of incense sticks, flowers, wine, and fruits before ancestral tablets and images of Mary and the saints. These offerings are later brought to family tombs, while an ancestral veneration ritual concludes the Mass. Commonly described as alay (offering), these practices situate Catholic devotion within networks of kinship, memory, and material practice.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in parishes and cemeteries in Manila, this paper examines how such offerings function as material mediators of remembrance in Chinese Filipino Catholic life. Engaging Jayeel Serrano Cornelio’s concept of “creative Catholics” (2016) alongside theological reflections on inculturation by Jonathan Y. Tan (2011), Peter C. Phan (2004), and Aristotle Dy (2005), the paper argues that alay operates as embodied memory through which Catholic identity is transmitted across generations, revealing material devotion as a form of prima theologia.