‘Vatican Girl’ brother voices no confidence in Vatican probe of her fate

ROME – After initially expressing hope that a Vatican investigation into his sister’s disappearance more than 40 years ago reflected “a desire of Pope Francis for the truth,” the brother of Emanuela Orlandi, the celebrated “Vatican girl” whose fate remains modern Italy’s most notorious unresolved mystery, is now voicing “no confidence” in the probe.

“I don’t have faith in the Vatican investigation,” Pietro Orlandi, the older brother of Emanuela, told a gathering in Sicily dedicated to combatting anti-female violence on August 24.

Instead, Orlandi said that his hopes now reside with two other parallel investigations of his sister’s case, one being conducted by Rome’s chief prosecutor and the other by a bipartisan panel of the Italian parliament.

“Hope for arriving at the truth is growing,” Orlandi said, despite his skepticism about the Vatican. “It’s important to talk about it in the schools, because I find in young people a sense of justice that adults often don’t have.”

Orlandi also denied recent speculation in the Italian media regarding a supposed private encounter with Pope Francis, saying the only time he’s met the pontiff was days after his election in April 2013 in front of the Vatican’s Church of St. Anne.

“Despite making many requests, I’ve never been given the possibility” of a private session with the pontiff, Orlandi said.

The 1983 disappearance of Emanuel Orlandi, whose father was a minor official in the Prefecture of the Papal Household and whose family lived in a Vatican apartment near the barracks of the Swiss Guards, has become a magnet for speculation and conspiracy theories over the years. The case has been variously linked to the 1981 assassination attempt against St. John Paul II, the Vatican bank scandals of the 1980s, alleged ties between the Vatican and the mafia, and rumors of a pedophile ring operating within the Vatican.

The popularity of a 2022 Netflix documentary on the Orlandi affair titled “Vatican Girl” created new pressure on both civil and ecclesiastical authorities to take a new look, culminating in a January 2023 announcement by the Vatican’s top prosecutor, veteran Italian attorney Alessandro Diddi, that his office was opening an investigation.

At the time, Orlandi and the family attorney, Laura Sgrò, welcomed the development. In April 2023 Orlandi had an eight-hour meeting with Diddi in which, among other things, he handed over a dossier of information he’d collected over the years, including a list of senior Vatican personnel he felt should be interviewed.

“I’m content because I was finally able to explain all the things that need to be looked into,” Orlandi said after that session. “Diddi assured me that his desire is to get to the bottom of things in the search for the truth, without discounts for anybody.”

That optimism, however proved to be short-lived.

Just two months later, Diddi appeared before a commission of the Italian senate to opposed the creation of a parliamentary inquest, a step that Orlandi strongly backed.

“I believe that in this moment, to open a third investigation that follows a logic and methods different than judicial authorities would be a dangerous intrusion for the integrity of the inquests already underway,” Diddi told the senate.

“An excess of interest in public opinion can constitute pollution of the integrity of the work we’re doing in collaboration with the prosecutor of Rome,” he said.

Those statements did not go down well with Orlandi, who urged the parliament to assert its independence in moving forward with its own probe. When more time passed without any indication of new findings by the Vatican, Orlandi became publicly critical.

“The pope has the power to bring forth everything there is to find, so it’s not about saying just ‘open a file and investigate. If he wanted to, Pope Francis has the power to impose [disclosure], and I’m sure that would be appreciated by everyone,” Orlandi said in the fall of 2023.

By the next January, the month during which Orlandi stages an annual sit-in to commemorate his sister’s birthday on Jan. 14, he was calling Diddi’s investigation a “farce.”

His comments in Sicily are thus of a piece with a growing lack of trust between the Vatican under Pope Francis and the Orlandi family, though Pietro insists the family will press on.

“We will never resign ourselves to the disappearance of my sister,” he told the gathering in Sicily. “We will continue to fight to know the truth.”

During the most recent hearing of the parliamentary panel, former Roman prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo, who investigated Orlandi’s disappearance in the 1980s, suggested that the late Rome mob boss Enrico De Pedis, known as “Renatino,” may have been involved for “a personal motive.”

Over the years, rumors have linked De Pedis to the case for other reasons, sometimes involving speculation about Pope John Paul II and the Vatican bank. Capaldo, however, rejected such theories, suggesting he merely facilitated the transfer of Emanuela from her original kidnappers to other unidentified parties.