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).
[5] Gelmini's experiences in Rome prompted his creation of the drug rehabilitation group Comunità Incontro (Community Encounter) in Amelia, Italy, where Gelmini purchased an abandoned mill and refurbished it to serve as a community therapy house after a personal encounter with an 18-year-old victim of a drug addiction lying in the middle of a street gutter.
[10]) The troubled Gelmini left Italy but ran into similar trouble in South Vietnam, where allegations of foul play involved embezzling from the influential Huế Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục and the widow of Ngô Đình Nhu, the political advisor of the overwhelmingly Buddhist country's Roman Catholic first president Ngo Dinh Diem.
[10] Despite such personal troubles, Comunità Incontro successfully expanded into a veritable network of services dedicated to the addicted and their varieties of social problems.
[11] A highly visible social figure towards the end of the 1980s, Gelmini produced written works in the 1990s which described both Centro Incontro's therapeutic approach and his own experiences.
Having established its first foreign center in 1987, the Comunità Incontro organization had grown to encompass more than two hundred chapters around the world by the late 2000s, including a number outside Italy and as far away as South America and Asia.
[3] (Berlusconi donated a gift of € 5 million to Comunità Incontro chapters in Thailand following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami disaster.
A New York Times report on tensions in Jewish-Catholic relations described the Catholic Church as a target of additional criticism when Gelmini placed blame for the sexual abuse accusations on unspecified "Jewish radical-chic" groups.
[15] The South African news and information website Independent Online provided a translation of remarks Gelmini had made to the Corriere della Sera.
[17] Still persisting in assigning blame by accusing the Freemasons, he was quoted by the Italian press as saying "I apologize to the Jews: I have very much respect and consideration for them, but I think there is a Masonic lodge radical chic fighting the Church on all fronts.
[12] Defense lawyer Lanfranco Frezza offered the explanation that some of the accusers bore a grudge against Gelmini because they had been kicked out of the center for theft and other improper behavior and asserted that "no proof" would be forthcoming to support their claims.