Pope wants light shed on 40-year-old mystery

One of Italy’s most
enduring mysteries, the disappearance of a Vatican schoolgirl 40
years ago, entered a new chapter on Tuesday when her brother met
with a Vatican investigator whom Pope Francis has given free
rein to get to the bottom of the case.
Over the past four decades tombs have been opened, bones
have been exhumed from forgotten grave sites and conspiracy
theories have abounded in attempts to determine just what became
of Emanuela Orlandi.
The daughter of a Vatican usher whose family lived in the
Vatican, Orlandi, then 15, failed to return home on June 22,
1983 following a music lesson in Rome.
The case, which has been the subject of on-and-off
investigations in Italy and the Vatican, has drawn fresh
worldwide attention following the release late last year of the
Netflix series “Vatican Girl”.
In January, Vatican chief prosecutor Alessandro Diddi
reopened a previous inconclusive Vatican investigation after he
inherited files from his retired predecessor.
In an interview with Corriere della Sera newspaper ahead of
the meeting, Diddi said Pope Francis wants “the truth to emerge
without any reservations”. He said the pope had an “iron will”
regarding the case.
Emanuela’s older brother Pietro and the family lawyer, Laura
Sgro, met with Diddi in the Vatican for more than five hours on
Tuesday afternoon.
“We hope this can shed light on this episode and write a
page of history,” Sgro told reporters afterwards, saying that
the Vatican’s openness and the pope’s determination was
“absolutely positive”.
Theories about Orlandi’s disappearance have run the gamut.
In the 1980s, Italian media speculated she had been kidnapped in
an attempt to secure freedom for Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk
jailed in 1981 for trying to assassinate Pope John Paul II,
though nothing came of the link and the suggestion faded.
Other reports linked her to the grave of Enrico De Pedis, a
mobster buried in a Rome basilica. His tomb was opened in 2012
but nothing was revealed, and in the interview with Corriere
della Sera, Diddi said the suspected link between the girl’s
disappearance and the Rome crime clan had been “over evaluated”.
In 2019, the Orlandi family received an anonymous letter
saying Emanuela’s body might be hidden among the dead in the
Teutonic Cemetery just inside the Vatican walls, where a statue
of an angel holding a book reads “Requiescat in Pace,” Latin for
“Rest in Peace”.
Two tombs were opened and nothing was found, not even the
bones of two 19th century princesses supposed to be buried
there. They apparently had been moved during restructuring work
decades before Orlandi was born.
In 2018, bones found during ground work at the Vatican
embassy in Rome sparked a media frenzy suggesting they might
belong to Orlandi or to Mirella Gregori, another teenager who
disappeared the same year. DNA tests were negative.
Last month, Italy’s lower house approved the establishment
of a parliamentary commission to investigate the disappearances
of both girls.
Police have never excluded the possibility that Orlandi may
have been abducted and possibly killed for reasons with no
connection to the Vatican, or been a victim of human
trafficking.
She would be 55 now.