IFTTT Autopost 
Today’s mission hero is a Twentieth Century Maryknoll missionary, John Romaniello.
The story begins in China in the middle of the twentieth century. A man named Mao Zedong brought to Communism to China. When that happened, many Catholic missionaries were imprisoned, tortured, killed, or expelled from the country.
The Maryknoll Fathers, Brothers, and Sisters were among those who suffered at the hands of the Communists. And some of the missionaries fled to Hong Kong, which was an island colony of Great Britain.
In just a couple of years after 1949, refugees fleeing from China made their way to Hong Kong. Soon, the island’s population grew from 500,000 people to more than two-and-a-half million. Some people described the Hong Kong of those days as the “largest refugee camp” in the world.
One of the priests who found his way to Hong Kong from China was a Maryknoll missionary priest named John Romaniello.
John was born in 1900 in Avigliana, Italy. When he was 9 years old, his parents moved the family to New Rochelle, New York to begin a new life.
In 1928, John graduated from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and was ordained a Maryknoll priest.
Fr. John was sent to work in China, the land where Maryknoll missionaries first began their mission work. There, he labored in various capacities until the Communists captured and expelled him in 1948. Though he wrote many books, Msgr. John – as he came to be known – is perhaps best known for his novel called Bird of Sorrow that is based on his many years in China.
After his expulsion from China, Msgr. John returned to the United States to obtain a master’s degree from Yale University in 1954 while teaching at Maryknoll Seminary in Maryknoll, New York. After serving for two years in Rome, Msgr. John went to work in Hong Kong until 1971.
It was in Hong Kong that John became famous throughout the world as “The Noodle Priest of Hong Kong.”
As refugees poured into Hong Kong from China, many were poor and hungry. Maryknoll missionaries, like others, worked constantly to help the refugees help themselves.
One day, while Msgr. John was walking around, he noticed something very strange. He saw many poor people lining up at a store holding bags of wheat flour in their hands. When it was their turn, they would turn over their bags of wheat flour to the storeowner. The storeowner would then turn their flour into noodles and give them to poor customer. One pound of flour would become one pound of noodles.
Msgr. John learned that the flour had come from a United States’ program called Food for Peace. This group provided flour, cornmeal and powdered milk. The Chinese people, however, did not eat bread.
Msgr. John, with American ingenuity and money, had an idea. He quickly obtained a dozen electric noodle machines to turn flour into noodles. In time, he established noodle factories throughout Hong Kong, allowing poor refugees to eat what they liked – pasta. Msgr. John said that giving pasta to the Chinese immigrants was simply a matter of reciprocity. He said, “For centuries, my Italian forebears enjoyed spaghetti, the food brought back from China by Marco Polo. I brought noodles to the Chinese at the rate of millions of pounds a year.”
In time, Msgr. John Romaniello came to be known as “The Noodle Priest of Hong Kong” and was even a guest on the old television show called “What’s my line?” He died at the age of 85 on October 23, 1985 of cancer.
