In December 1958, delegates to the Southeast Asian Bishops' Conference unanimously resolved to build a radio station capable of serving the whole region in its own languages rather than relying on programming built for Europe or North America and translated after the fact. What they envisioned took more than a decade to become real. Test broadcasts began in 1967, and on April 11, 1969, Radio Veritas Asia formally went on the air from a facility in Fairview, Quezon City, inaugurated by the Vatican official Cardinal Antonio Samore alongside Manila's own Archbishop, Cardinal Rufino Santos.
The first overseas broadcast used two 100 kilowatt shortwave transmitters, a serious technical investment for a missionary broadcasting project with no commercial revenue behind it, funded instead through the collective will of bishops across a region where the Catholic Church remained, outside the Philippines, a minority faith working in dozens of local languages. The station's early growth reflected that mandate directly: rather than broadcasting in English or a single regional lingua franca, RVA built out programming in the specific languages of the communities it hoped to reach, eventually growing past twenty distinct Asian languages.
The bishops who first proposed the idea in 1958 could not have specified exactly what RVA would become, but the shape of the project, a shared regional broadcasting service built by cooperation among national churches rather than by any single country's hierarchy, proved durable enough to outlast the medium it was built on, continuing its mission today as a digital rather than a shortwave broadcaster.