The brother of a 15-year-old girl who disappeared in the Vatican expressed a shocking version

Shortly before her disappearance in the summer of 1983, Emanuela Orlandi went to Piazza del Catalone, a small square just outside the Vatican walls, to meet friends.

According to The Observer, that sweltering June, just weeks after Roma won the Serie A title, was still a party atmosphere. A photograph taken at the time shows Orlandi, then 15, wearing a headband in the yellow and red colors of the football team that her mother had sewn. It was one of the last photographs of the teenage girl taken before she disappeared without a trace on June 22, 1983, and became the defining image of her older brother Pietro Orlandi’s tireless search for the truth.

“Emanuela has always been here with friends,” he told The Observer in Piazza del Catalona. They were still celebrating; it was the last picture of her smiling.”

The disappearance of Emanuela, whom the family had not seen since leaving her home in the Vatican, where her father was a layman in the papal home, for a flute lesson in Rome, shook Italy for four decades.

But it wasn’t until January of this year that the powerful and incomprehensible Holy See launched its own investigation, along with its champion of justice, Alessandro Diddi, vowing to leave no stone unturned in a mystery that has given rise to many theories, some of them outlandish, but without concrete facts. Rome’s prosecutors began cooperating with the Vatican in the investigation this month.

“In 40 years there has never been any collaboration between them,” said Orlandi, who recently sparked controversy after hinting that the deeply revered Pope John Paul II may have been involved in the disappearance of his younger sister. “A few years ago, the Vatican stated that it knew nothing that she had disappeared in Italy, and therefore it needed to be investigated there. On the other hand, I was told that there are many documents in Rome. All these years, the Vatican has remained silent – perhaps this means that someone there has evidence of what happened.

The Vatican investigation comes months after the Netflix series “Vatican Girl” brought Emanuela’s case back to global attention. The series dealt with theories that have surfaced over the years, the first being that she was kidnapped by a gang to blackmail the Vatican into freeing Mehmet Ali Agca, who was imprisoned in 1981 after an assassination attempt on John Paul II. . Her disappearance has also been linked to a spate of financial scandals at the Vatican Bank, an alleged sex gang run by the Vatican police, and the mafia.

Another theory was that Emanuela was taken to London, where she lived for many years in a youth hostel owned by a Catholic congregation, with the Vatican funding her expenses. According to this hypothesis, she died in London before her body was transported back to Rome and buried in the Vatican. In 2019, two tombs in the Vatican were reopened after information surfaced that Emanuela may have been buried there. No human remains, however, have been found, writes The Observer.

But the newest and most startling claim in the Netflix series comes from childhood friend Emanuela, who said the girl confessed to her that he was molested by “someone close” to John Paul II.

“She said that the conversation had taken place a few days before Emanuela’s disappearance and that [предполагаемый инцидент] took place in the gardens of the Vatican,” Orlandi said. That Emanuela could have been a victim of pedophilia is probably the most plausible theory, he added. “When you know that in such an environment they do certain things, maybe she was put in such a situation?”

Orlandi’s determination to get to the bottom of the truth irritated the Vatican. In April, during an interrogation at the Vatican prosecutor’s office, he shared an audio recording containing an alleged conversation between a journalist and the boss of a Roman criminal organization suspected of being involved in Emanuela’s disappearance. On the recording, the crime boss hinted that the late John Paul II, whose real name was Karol Jozef Wojtyla, allegedly went out at night with senior clergy in search of teenage girls.

Part of the audio recording was later shown on an Italian TV program during an interview with Orlandi, in which he added: “They tell me that Wojtyła sometimes went out in the evening with two Polish monsignors, and it certainly wasn’t to bless houses.”

Pope Francis denounced “offensive and baseless insinuations” during his Sunday liturgy, while the Vatican’s daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano called the “anonymous, shameful allegations” “insanity”.

Orlandi claims that the Vatican used the dispute to discredit him. “I have always said that I believe that John Paul knew something,” he said. “But it was the person on the audio recording who used offensive words about him. I also named two monsignors who were close to John Paul. Everyone knew that sometimes they went out together at night. I just added that they [прогулки] were not for religious reasons.

He also wondered if Pope Francis knew anything about his sister’s fate when, shortly after his election in 2013, the pontiff told him that Emanuela was “in heaven.”

“He said those words to me, I don’t know why,” Orlandi said. “For [Йозефа] Ratzinger [его предшественника, папы римского Бенедикта XVI] Emanuela was taboo. So the fact that Francis used her name made me think that he wanted to cooperate with me, but since then he never wanted to meet again.”

Orlandi, who has three other sisters, described a privileged childhood within the walls of the Vatican, where they enjoyed the gardens and felt like they were in “the safest place in the world.”

His desire for truth is partly affected by guilt. The day she disappeared, Emanuela asked him to give her a lift to her flute lesson. “It was so hot in Rome and I didn’t want to go,” he says. She got a little angry and left. I still wonder if this would have happened if I had taken her with me.”

Time will tell if the investigation yields the answers it needs. “All these years we didn’t know if Emanuela was alive or dead,” says the missing girl’s brother. “I will continue my fight until the very end.”