Forty years after the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the teenage daughter of a clerk at the Holy See, a new theory implicating a relative of the young woman as a suspect has further entangled one of Italy’s greatest unsolved mysteries , which has gone around the world thanks to a Netflix documentary, La chica del Vaticano.
Emanuela Orlandi, 15 years old, vanished in June 1983 when she was returning from her music class in Piazza Sant’Apollinare, in the heart of Rome, without her family ever knowing anything more. She was the daughter of an official who worked directly with the Pope, and lived within the walls of the Vatican. Therefore, everything that surrounds the case has always aroused a great fascination, because it was thought that she could have been kidnapped to put pressure on the Holy See in some way. There have been all kinds of clues, since the CIA, the KGB, the Masonic lodge P2, financial sectors of the Vatican, the Roman mafia of La Magliana, the Bulgarian agents were involved or even it was related to the attempt of assassination of John Paul II in 1981 by the Turk Ali Agca.
None of these hypotheses led to anything. In January, the Vatican surprisingly announced the opening of the case, forty years later, after Emanuela’s brother Pietro Orlandi, who has never stopped looking for her, wrote to Pope Francis to explain that there were “new elements” about the disappearance. He got the Vatican prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, to announce an investigation, the first formally opened within the Holy See, although Italy had already opened two other investigations for its part without reaching any conclusion.
Months later, this alleged family track has outraged the girl’s family, which accuses the Vatican of leaks to divert attention. Everything comes after the news of the television channel La 7 announced on Monday an “exclusive”, documents handed over by the Vatican prosecutor, Diddi, to the Prosecutor’s Office in Rome, in which “a new hypothesis” appears that involves as a suspect the ‘ uncle of the young woman, Mario Meneguzzi.
According to this media, the magistrates are studying the clue of the family drama after finding a letter between a priest and a senior Vatican official dated three months after Orlandi’s disappearance. Here, the priest, spiritual confessor of Natalina Orlandi, the older sister of the missing girl, explained that Meneguzzi – dead years ago – would have made sexual advances with Natalina, which has caused a huge uproar in the Italian media.
All this has angered the family, who appeared at a press conference yesterday. Natalina, accompanied by the family’s lawyer, Laura Sgro, denied that her uncle had anything to do with Emanuela’s disappearance, explaining that he was traveling on the day of the disappearance, and also denied that there was “sexual abuse”, but what he experienced when he was 21 was “verbal courtship”. “When he understood that there was no possibility he stopped. I only explained it to my boyfriend, now my husband, and to my father confessor”, he remarked, and regretted that the secret of the confession was leaked to the press. On his side, Pietro Orlandi accused journalists of scavengers and the Vatican of leaking these documents in order to “not assume their responsibility and blame it on other people”. “They target my uncle, but why don’t they go against three or four pederasty cardinals?” asked Pietro Orlandi, who urged Pope Francis to “intervene in the matter”.
