The Vatican said Monday it had reopened the investigation into the 1983 disappearance of the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee, months after a new Netflix documentary purported to shed new light on the case and weeks after her family told him asked the Italian Parliament to take up the cause.
Vatican prosecutor Alessandro Diddi has opened a file on Emanuela Orlandi’s disappearance, based in part “on requests made by the family in various places,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said.
A lawyer for the Orlandi family, Laura Sgro, said she had no independent confirmation of the development, which was first reported by Italian news agencies Adnkronos, LaPresse and ANSA. She noted that her last presentation to the Vatican on the case came in 2019.
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Orlandi disappeared on June 22, 1983 after leaving his family’s Vatican City apartment for a music lesson in Rome. His father was a lay employee of the Holy See.
Lawyer Laura Sgro, left, listens to her client Pietro Orlandi, the brother of Manuela, a 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee who disappeared in 1983, in Rome, December 20, 2022. The Vatican has reopened the case for the crime that occurred in 1983.
(AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)
His disappearance has been one of the Vatican’s enduring mysteries, and over the years has been linked to everything from the plot to kill Saint John Paul II and a financial scandal involving the Vatican bank to the criminal underworld. from Rome.
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The recent four-part Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl” explored those scenarios and also provided new testimony from a friend who said Emanuela had told her a week before she disappeared that a high-ranking Vatican cleric had made sexual advances on her.
In addition, Sgro and Orlandi’s brother, Pietro, announced last month a new initiative to convene a parliamentary commission to investigate the case.
Three previous initiatives in the Italian parliament failed to get off the ground, but Sgro and opposition lawmaker Carlo Calenda argued that the Vatican could not close the case when so many questions remained unanswered.
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Speaking to RaiNews24 on Monday, Pietro Orlandi called Diddi’s decision a “positive step” that the Vatican has apparently changed its mind, overcome its resistance and will now review the case from the beginning.
