Comunità Incontro

Comunità Incontro (English: Community Encounter) is an Italian drug rehabilitation facility founded by Pierino Gelmini, an Italian Catholic priest, on 13 February 1963. The facility, which is based in Amelia, Italy, received substantial backlash following Gelmini's 1971 arrest on charges of fraud, as well as further accusations of child sexual abuse by Gelmini before his death in 2014.[1]

Founding

Gelmini's experiences in Rome prompted his creation of the drug rehabilitation group in Amelia when 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.[2] (In publications, the Comunità Incontro records the 13 February 1963 date of Gelmini's meeting with the young drug addict, Alfredo Nunzi, as the date of its founding, although its first center at the Amelia mill was only opened on 27 September 1979.[3])

Expansion

Comunità Incontro successfully expanded into a veritable network of services dedicated to the addicted and their varieties of social problems. At the beginning of the 1990s, Gelmini volunteered to be injected with an experimental AIDS vaccine in a study dedicated to finding an approach to dealing with HIV.[4] Having established its first foreign center in 1987, the 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. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi presented a speech on the occasion of Gelmini's birthday in January 2005.[5] (Berlusconi donated a gift of € 5 million to Comunità Incontro chapters in Thailand following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami disaster.[6]) The politician Maurizio Gasparri characterized him as "one of the few heroes of our time."[5][7] Mass media reports worldwide have described Gelmini as politically well-connected.[5]

References
  1. Guerrera, Antonello (13 August 2014). "E' morto don Gelmini, il prete anti-droga amico di Berlusconi" (in Italian). la Repubblica. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
  2. Owen, Margaret (1989). "New Hope for Sero-Positive Intravenous Drug Abusers in a Therapeutic Community House". Community Development Journal Vol. 24, No. 3. pp. 210-217. Oxford Journals. Retrieved 7 July 2010.
  3. Comunità Incontro. Archived 2011-07-22 at the Wayback Machine Associazioni. Diocesi di Terni Narni Amelia. Retrieved 9 July 2010. (in Italian)
  4. "Don Gelmini anti AIDS" (29 June 1992). Corriere della Sera, p. 19. Retrieved 7 July 2010. (in Italian)
  5. "Eminent Italian Ex-Priest to Stand Trial for Abuse" (18 June 2010). Reuters. Retrieved 7 July 2010.
  6. "Ex-Priest Faces Abuse Charges" (18 June 2010). AFP
  7. "Ex-Priest Indicted in Italy for Molesting Kids" (18 June 2010). Associated Press. CBS News. Retrieved 7 July 2010.
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