Pierino Gelmini

Pietro "Pierino" Gelmini (20 January 1925 – 12 August 2014) was a prominent Italian former Roman Catholic priest who founded the drug abuse rehabilitation center Comunità Incontro (Community Encounter).

Despite his 1971 imprisonment on charges of fraud, Gelmini has been highly regarded for his work with the drug-addicted, having received praise from such figures as media tycoon and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who gave € 5 million (six million dollars) to Comunità Incontro in 2005, and the Italian Senator Maurizio Gasparri, who once celebrated him as "one of the few heroes of our time."

Personally accused of sexual abuse by a total of twelve young men who claim to have been victimized while recovering at Gelmini's Amelia rehabilitation center, Gelmini was indicted in June 2010 and is currently awaiting a trial set to commence in 2011. Gelmini has been laicized from the priesthood at his own request.

Pierino Gelmini was born Pietro Gelmini in 1925 in Pozzuolo Martesana, a small community in the Province of Milan, and grew up and studied in his native Lombardy. (His official biography records him as a member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War.) He was ordained in the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church in 1949. Gelmini's younger brother, Angelo Gelmini (born 1931), was ordained in 1952 and is well known as Padre Eligio. Gelmini transferred to work in Rome in the 1950s.

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