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, where he became the personal secretary of the Argentine cardinal
Luic Copello and established himself at the
Infernetto, a suburb under
Rome Municipio X. (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.) Italian
investigative press reports during the 2000s uncovered that in the 1960s and 1970s Gelmini was investigated for the
white-collar charges of
bankruptcy fraud and writing
bad checks by prosecutors. (He was arrested a total of three times between 1960 and 1976.) 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. 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. Some writing was translated into
Slovenian and
French; a 1993
English translation,
A Plan for Life Community Encounter: Origins, History, Growth, was printed in the
United Kingdom by St. Paul's Press. In Italy, Gelmini's work became a subject of various domestic writers. Having established its first foreign centre 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.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi presented a speech on the occasion of Gelmini's birthday in January 2005. Two years before, Gelmine had been reduced to the lay state after the charges of minor
sexual abuse. ==Controversy==