Modern rehabilitation in Italy: the lesson of Father Carlo Gnocchi.

Carlo Gnocchi was born in San Colombano al Lambro, near Milan (Italy), on October 25th, 1902, and he died in Milan in 1956. The 50th anniversary of his death was commemorated in 2006.1 His father died from meningitis in 1909, when Carlo was 7 yrs old. Carlo soon manifested his vocation to the priesthood, and in 1915 he entered the seminar of San Pietro Martire a Seveso (Milan); he was ordered priest in 1925. From an early age, Carlo Gnocchi proved to have notable formative capacities. He was also a great lover of skiing and trekking. When World War II began, Father Gnocchi asked to be enrolled in the military, so as to be able to follow the young people of whom he was in charge onto the battle fields. At first, his superiors refused permission, but, in the end, on Father Carlo’s strong insistence, he was sent as chaplain of the Julia division to the Greek–Albanian front (1941). In 1942 he was sent, as chaplain with the rank of lieutenant, to Russia with the Tridentina division of the Italian Alpine troops. The wartime experience had a notable influence on Father Carlo, as evidenced in his written memoirs collected in the book Christ with the Alpine Troops2 (1942), a text that was followed by another book, The Human Person Restored3 (1946). In this latter book, the author discussed the problem of the Italian postwar period, proposing the innovative idea that reconstruction should not be limited to the material needs of social reality but that it should also involve those of the body, both in its physical and spiritual dimensions, and that it should, thus, be targeted to the recovery of the whole human being.