Enzo Boschetti

Enzo Boschetti was born on 19 November 1929 in Costa de' Nobili, a small agricultural commune in the province of Pavia in Lombardy, northern Italy. He came from a modest rural family and entered the diocesan seminary of Pavia, where he completed his priestly formation. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Pavia on 29 June 1955. In the years after ordination he served as a curate in parishes of the diocese and was later appointed parish priest of San Lanfranco in Pavia, a post with which his later pastoral work is closely associated.

From the late 1960s he devoted increasing attention to young people on the margins of society. Italy was then experiencing a sharp rise in drug use among adolescents and young adults, and Boschetti began to receive youths in difficulty at the parish, offering hospitality, work, and personal accompaniment rather than a purely clinical or institutional response. That pastoral experiment grew into a more stable community. In 1975 he founded the Casa del Giovane (House of the Young) in Pavia, a residential house conceived on a family model of recovery, shared labor, prayer, and reintegration. The work later expanded through further houses and a network of cooperators, while remaining under diocesan rather than religious-order structures.

Boschetti lived as a diocesan priest of simple personal habits and insisted that rehabilitation of addicted or excluded young people required a Christian vision of the person, conversion, and patient relationship, not only technical treatment. He did not found a classical canonical religious institute, though the Casa del Giovane developed a structured community life around his leadership. He died in Pavia on 15 February 1993. His reputation for holiness led the Diocese of Pavia to open a cause of beatification; after the diocesan inquiry and the preparation of the positio, Pope Francis authorized on 14 April 2018 the decree on his heroic virtues, by which Boschetti was declared Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonized, and no universal liturgical feast or official patronage has been assigned to him. The Casa del Giovane continued after his death as a work for young people in difficulty.