Francis acknowledged them within the crowd and advised Orlandi’s mom, “Emanuela is in heaven.” Then he mentioned it once more to Pietro: “Emanuela is in heaven.”
“It chilled my blood,” Pietro Orlandi later advised the Italian newspaper Repubblica. Was Francis obliquely confirming that the Vatican knew one thing about her disappearance? Or was he merely making an attempt to supply phrases of consolation to a household well-known for its campaign to seek out the lacking girl?
Pope Francis didn’t point out Emanuela Orlandi once more publicly within the 10 years after that assembly, her household mentioned — regardless of their repeated appeals — till this week when he mentioned throughout his Sunday blessing that he wished “to express once again my closeness to the family, especially to the mother, and to assure them of my prayers.”
The Orlandi thriller has been a nationwide obsession in Italy for 40 years, as of this month, but it surely went worldwide final 12 months with the discharge of the Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.” In the four-part sequence, Orlandi’s members of the family, their legal professional, police investigators and several other Italian journalists undergo the case, all of them concluding that the Vatican is aware of greater than it has mentioned.
Vatican conspiracy theories have an extended historical past, even earlier than the Dan Brown e book “The DaVinci Code” flew off the cabinets. Rumors of homicide or suicide have lengthy surrounded the demise of Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978 after solely a month as pope, with out a shred of proof. And regardless of no less than three investigations, nobody has ever been charged in reference to Emanuela’s disappearance.
Vatican City is one of the smallest sovereign states on this planet, comprising about 100 acres embedded contained in the Italian capital. Most of its residents are clergy — clergymen, cardinals, bishops — however there may be additionally a small quantity of non-clergy Vatican workers who dwell there with their households. The Orlandi household had lived and labored within the metropolis for greater than 100 years, serving seven popes as ushers and messengers, in line with the documentary. In the 1980s, usher Ercole Orlandi lived in an condominium there together with his spouse, son and 4 daughters. Emanuela was the second youngest.
On the afternoon of June 22, 1983, Emanuela went to a music lesson in Rome. Sometime within the early night, she known as residence to say {that a} man had supplied her a fast job handing out leaflets for Avon cosmetics and that she could be late. When she didn’t return residence that night time, the household instantly started trying to find her. They went to the police, ran advertisements within the newspaper and lined town in posters emblazoned with Emanuela’s tranquil face.
Emanuela was a Vatican citizen, however since she had been final seen in Rome, the Vatican left the investigation to Italian authorities, who at first suspected the girl had run away.
Kidnapping for ransom wasn’t unusual in Italy at the moment (see the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III), however when a person with an American accent started calling the Orlandi residence quickly afterward, claiming he knew the place Emanuela was, he didn’t demand cash. Instead, he demanded the discharge from jail of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who two years earlier had tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
“The American,” because the household got here to name him, performed a recording that appeared like Emanuela saying the title of her faculty and despatched the media a photocopy of her faculty ID with a word in her handwriting. Another tape despatched to the media revealed sounds of a younger girl crying out in ache.
Then-Pope John Paul II made a public attraction “in the name of God and humanity” that the abductors return Emanuela unhurt, The Washington Post reported on the time.
Agca, who claimed to have been educated by Soviet intelligence, was not launched by Italian authorities, and “the American” finally stopped calling.
Over the years, weird clues and much more weird theories of her disappearance have emerged, a couple of of which had been detailed within the Netflix sequence. In one principle, an Italian journalist adopted an nameless tip to the previous girlfriend of an Italian crime household boss, who claimed she had helped disguise Emanuela at a number of places in Rome earlier than delivering her to a person dressed as a priest at a Vatican fuel station.
Some journalists have speculated, with out proof, that her case might be linked to an Italian banking scandal and that Pope John Paul II could have used Mafia cash to fund anti-communist teams in his native Poland. The Mafia kidnapped a Vatican citizen to get their a reimbursement, that principle goes.
Another journalist, who acquired from secret Vatican sources a bevy of paperwork within the 2012 scandal dubbed “Vatileaks,” claimed in 2017 to have gotten an expense doc displaying Emanuela was residing in London beneath the care of Catholic clergymen till 1997, when she seems to have died. The Vatican known as the doc “false and ridiculous.”
The filmmakers additionally spoke with a childhood good friend of Emanuela’s, who claimed that shortly earlier than Emanuela’s disappearance, she had confessed {that a} man near the pope had molested her.
Then there’s Marco Accetti, who in 2013 claimed to be “the American” from the ransom calls. He had kidnapped Emanuela and one other girl on behalf of a secretive Vatican faction for causes he couldn’t reveal, he advised Italian media, and even produced a flute case that the Orlandi household confirmed appeared like one with which Emanuela disappeared. But when requested to offer particulars of Emanuela’s situation that solely “the American” and her household would know, Accetti had no solutions.
In the Netflix doc, Pietro Orlandi advised the filmmakers he now believed Accetti could have been concerned within the disappearance of the opposite girl however not in his sister’s.
In 2019, an legal professional representing the Orlandi household acquired an nameless tip suggesting Emanuela’s stays had been buried in a small Vatican cemetery for long-dead German royalty. Incredibly, the Vatican, which beforehand had declined to take part in any of the investigations into Emanuela’s disappearance, agreed to open the tombs. But the tombs had been empty; even the stays of the German princesses who had been imagined to be buried there have been lacking.
In January 2023, a couple of months after the discharge of the documentary, the Vatican introduced that it might open an investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance and final week mentioned it had uncovered new leads “worthy of further investigation,” in line with the Associated Press. Rome prosecutors have additionally reopened the case, and now, days after Pope Francis’s acknowledgment, Italy’s parliament could quickly open a proper inquest into the case.
“A taboo has fallen,” the Orlandi household’s legal professional advised the AP. “It wasn’t a given, and we are grateful to Pope Francis for this gesture.”
