Having left Gaeta with the desire for mission in her heart, Sister Teresa Capobianco found herself (unexpectedly) working for four decades in Hong Kong. Where did you learn that, to bear witness to Jesus, “everything begins with human relationships”
Friendship. This is the key word of Sister Teresa’s long mission, who in the 1960s left her sea in southern Lazio at a very young age and reached a Milan unknown to her to pursue the dream of becoming a nun and «serving the poor in some African village or in an Indian leper colony» and instead worked for forty years in Hong Kong, in one of the most developed contexts in Asia.
The poor, however, he served them all the same. Whether they were the farmers of the extreme suburbs of the then British colony or the neighbors in the soulless skyscrapers of the glittering metropolis, who materially lacked for nothing but who could not fill the void they felt in their hearts.
Sister Teresa Capobianco, born in 1948 in Gaeta (Latina), became a Missionary of the Immaculate thanks to the passionate stories of the PIME fathers who brought their testimony to young people like her gathered at the sanctuary of Montagna Spaccata, above the rocks overlooking the sea of the gulf. But when, on a rainy afternoon in February 1983, she landed in Hong Kong, she immediately understood that her mission would be particular, in some ways more complex than the “classic” one she had imagined as a young girl, because it would require absolute dedication to succeed to reach the heart of a people immersed in a culture that is difficult for a Westerner to understand. Starting with the language. “Studying Chinese was my first and only commitment for months after I arrived in the new community,” she says.
Sister Teresa lived with nine other sisters in a school for girls in Shek Lei, in the New Territories, on a hill very close to the border with China, from which about four million displaced people had arrived in previous decades. “Poor people, who lived crammed into huge public houses, often in one large room per family, with shared bathrooms: I remember the long bamboos fixed outside the windows where the women hung out the clothes”. It was Monsignor Lorenzo Bianchi del PIME, bishop of Hong Kong, who wanted a girls’ secondary school right there, opened by the nuns in 1969 and which soon became a point of reference for education in the area: «Paul VI College today houses 800 girls , of which about forty Catholics, from middle school to the end of high school”.
With the students, however, Sister Teresa was not yet able to communicate: «I always needed the help of the sisters. So I began to follow one of our Indian nuns who worked in the small parish and here, during the meetings or prayer retreats, I had the opportunity to get to know some adolescents and young Catholics”. The real immersion in the local context would arrive a year and a half later, with the transfer to a small community in the rural area of Kam Tin, even more remote: «People raised pigs, pigeons… I remember the mosquitoes that tormented us! The community was in a parish which had no resident priest and where we Missionaries of the Immaculate had gone at the request of the bishop. Here I began to follow the first group of children for catechism, trying to stammer my Chinese … We also went to a village school where the students were mostly non-Christians. Every Saturday, with Sister Luigia Mindassi and together with a PIME father, we reached the innermost villages where some Catholic families lived who had remained away from the Church for a long time, and the Eucharist was celebrated in small chapels. They really were the suburbs that Pope Francis is talking about today! During the week we gathered the children and did some catechism, organized games. And then we visited families, Catholics and not only. Some invited us into their homes and offered us a cup of tea, a piece of fruit. Thus, I began to create the first relationships».
A few years later, Father Vincenzo Carbone asked the Missionaries of the Immaculate to join him in the Tai Po district, still in the New Territories but in an urban parish that was rapidly developing. “So I moved to this area of skyscrapers where it was necessary to accompany the faithful scattered over a very large area”, says the nun from Gaeta. “Slowly we tried to create many small communities of faith in the different neighborhoods: we met in the evening at the home of some parishioner and we discussed different topics starting from the Word of God. Everyone underlined an aspect that was close to their heart and he shared his life experiences, and then we prayed together». A way to “create bonds between the faithful and also bring the new families who were constantly arriving closer together”.
In those years, Sister Teresa experienced the intensity of relationships: “Matteo Ricci was truly right: friendship is the first step in getting closer to the Chinese people! The people are welcoming, cordial and generous, but also grateful and constant in maintaining human contact. I started with small things, such as food: parishioners often invited us out for lunch and the first few times I found it hard to appreciate some dishes, such as boiled chicken and goose feet, sea cucumbers… Then slowly I entered the context and today I really love Chinese cuisine».
In Tai Po, Sister Teresa also experimented with an innovative parish management formula: «The community was led by an international team of Chinese, American, Canadian and Italian priests and nuns. There were eight of us and we met every week to share all the aspects, with equal responsibilities according to the roles… we had already begun to experience the synodality we are talking about today”.
Perhaps the strongest period of immersion in the daily life of the inhabitants of Hong Kong was the one – no less than eighteen years – spent in Tsing Yi, a small island in the urban area where the Missionaries of the Immaculate live on the 21st floor of a skyscraper which houses almost a thousand residents. «Every day, to go to the parish or to do the shopping at the market, you have to take the lift there. And that was an opportunity for us to get to know the other families, mostly non-Catholic. Gradually cordial ties were created with our neighbors on the landing, so much so that when I was sick they brought me Chinese soup. And we, in turn, tried to take an interest in their lives… a form of evangelization without words». Which, in some cases, has left its mark: “I am not speaking only of those who have decided to get baptized, but also of many people who have let their hearts be touched by Jesus and have been healed, just as happens in the Gospel”.
The intensity of the relationships woven over the years in the mission Sr. Teresa saw in the moment of trial, when – four years ago – she was diagnosed with a serious illness. «It was a period in which I was very busy, I followed a group of catechumens… it was a shock for me to understand that I would have to suspend many initiatives and live my testimony in a different way. Yet even in the context of hospitalization and treatment there have been special people with whom to share my suffering, many friends have made themselves available to assist me in my medical and practical needs. And then, despite my fragility, I was able to carry out an assistance service for the guests of a rehabilitation center for former drug addicts, with whom a profound dialogue was born”. A dialogue interrupted – but only from the point of view of physical presence – by the need to return to Italy last December for new treatments. Still, not a day goes by without the nun receiving a message or a phone call from the people she shared a stretch of road with in Hong Kong. “What’s left of the mission for me? The friendship remains.”