ROME — Exactly 40 years after the disappearance of the teenage daughter of a Vatican employee, the institution said Thursday that new leads “worth investigating” had emerged in the hope of finally getting to the bottom of one of the greatest mysteries of the Vatican. Holy See.
Emanuela Orlandi disappeared on June 22, 1983 after leaving the apartment where she lived with her family in Vatican City to go to a music class in Rome. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See.
Over the years, his disappearance has been linked to all sorts of affairs, from the plot to assassinate Saint John Paul II, to the financial scandal involving the Vatican bank and the Italian capital’s underworld.
Vatican criminal prosecutor Alessandro Diddi said on Thursday that he had recently forwarded to the Rome prosecutor’s office all the relevant evidence he had gathered in the six months since the investigations reopened. In a statement, he promised to continue investigating the case.
Popular interest in the case was renewed last year with the documentary “The Girl from the Vatican,” a four-episode Netflix miniseries that explored the various hypotheses about her disappearance and included new testimony from a friend who claimed that Orlandi had told a week earlier that a high-ranking cleric had made sexual advances to her.
After the documentary was broadcast and given the proximity of the 40th anniversary of the disappearance, Orlandi’s family, with the support of some legislators, lobbied for the opening of a parliamentary commission of inquiry. On the other hand, the Vatican and Rome prosecutors reopened the investigations.
The former chief prosecutor in Rome who filed the case in the Italian judicial system, Giuseppe Pignatone, is now the chief judge of the Vatican’s criminal court, where Diddi is chief prosecutor.
Diddi said in a statement that his office had collected “all available evidence in Vatican and Holy See structures” and questioned people who held Vatican posts 40 years ago.
Pietro Orlandi, who has been fighting for 40 years to discover the truth of what happened to his sister, plans to protest with a sit-in near the Vatican on Sunday. He maintains that the institution has never told the truth about what he knows about the case.
