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It was March 2013 and Pope Francis was preaching his first Mass after being elected head of the Catholic Church. Pietro Orlandi waited outside a small church in Vatican City with his mother, hoping to meet the new pope and ask him for help in finding his sister Emanuela. She had disappeared from the streets of Rome 30 years earlier at the age of 15.
Francis recognized her in the crowd and said to Orlandi’s mother, “Emanuela is in heaven.” Then he said it again to Pietro: “Emanuela is in heaven.”
“It made my blood run cold,” Pietro Orlandi later told the Italian newspaper Repubblica. Did Francis indirectly confirm that the Vatican knew about her disappearance? Or was he just trying to say words of comfort to a family famous for their search for the missing girl?
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Pope Francis did not mention Emanuela Orlandi publicly in the decade after that meeting, her family said — despite repeated appeals — until he said at his Sunday blessing this week that he wanted “once again to express my closeness to the family.” , especially to the mother, and to assure her of my prayers.”
As of this month, the Orlandi mystery has been a national obsession in Italy for 40 years, but last year it went international with the release of the Netflix documentary Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. In the four-part series, Orlandi’s family members, her lawyer, police investigators and several Italian journalists go through the case and all come to the conclusion that the Vatican knows more than it’s letting on.
Vatican conspiracy theories have a long history, well before Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code hit shelves. Murder-suicide rumors have long swirled around the death of Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978 after just a month as pope, with absolutely no evidence to support it. And despite at least three investigations, no one has ever been charged in connection with Emanuela’s disappearance.
One of the smallest sovereign states in the world, Vatican City covers about 100 hectares nestled in the Italian capital. Most of its citizens are clergy — priests, cardinals, bishops — but there are also a small number of Vatican non-clergy employees who live there with their families. According to the documentary, the Orlandi family lived and worked in the city for more than 100 years, serving seven popes as court ushers and messengers. In the 1980s, usher Ercole Orlandi lived there with his wife, son and four daughters in an apartment. Emanuela was the second youngest.
On the afternoon of June 22, 1983, Emanuela attended a music class in Rome. Sometime in the early evening, she called home to say that a man had offered her a quick job distributing leaflets for Avon cosmetics and that she would be late. When she didn’t come home that night, the family immediately began looking for her. They went to the police, placed ads in the newspapers, and covered the city with posters featuring Emanuela’s calm face.
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Emanuela was a Vatican citizen, but since she had last been seen in Rome, the Vatican left the investigation to Italian authorities, who initially suspected the girl had run away.
Kidnappings for ransom were not uncommon in Italy at the time (see the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III), but soon after, a man with an American accent began calling the Orlando home, claiming he knew where Emanuela was , he didn’t I’m not asking for money. Instead, he called for the release from prison of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II two years earlier.
“The American,” as the family called him, played a recording that sounded like Emanuela saying the name of her school and sent it to the media a photocopy of their school ID with a handwritten note. Another tape sent to the media showed the sounds of a young woman screaming in pain.
Then-Pope John Paul II publicly appealed “in the name of God and mankind” for the kidnappers to return Emanuela unharmed, the Washington Post reported at the time.
Agca, who claimed to have been trained by Soviet intelligence, was not released by Italian authorities, and “the American” finally stopped calling.
Bizarre clues and even more bizarre theories surrounding her disappearance have surfaced over the years, some of which have been detailed in the Netflix series. According to one theory, an Italian journalist followed an anonymous tip to the former girlfriend of an Italian crime family boss, who claimed she helped hide Emanuela at several locations in Rome before handing her over to a man dressed as a priest at a Vatican gas station.
Some journalists have speculated, without evidence, that their case may be linked to an Italian banking scandal and that Pope John Paul II may have used mafia funds to fund anti-communist groups in his native Poland. The mafia kidnapped a Vatican citizen to get his money back, the theory goes.
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Another journalist obtained from secret Vatican sources A bevy of documents in the 2012 scandal called “Vatileaks” claimed having received an expense document in 2017 showing that Emanuela lived in London under the care of Catholic priests until 1997, when she apparently died. The Vatican called the document “false and ridiculous”.
The filmmakers also spoke to a childhood friend of Emanuela, who claimed that shortly before Emanuela’s disappearance, she confessed that a man close to the Pope molested her.
Then there’s Marco Accetti, who claimed in 2013 that he was “the American” of ransomware. He had kidnapped Emanuela and another girl on behalf of a secret faction in the Vatican for reasons he could not divulge, He told Italian media and even produced a flute case, which the Orlandi family confirmed resembled one that Emanuela disappeared with. But when asked to provide details about Emanuela’s condition that only “the American” and her family would know, she replied: Accetti had no answers.
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In the Netflix documentary, Pietro Orlandi told the filmmakers that he now believes Accetti may have been involved in the other girl’s disappearance, but not his sister’s disappearance.
In 2019, a lawyer for the Orlandi family received an anonymous tip suggesting that Emanuela’s remains were buried in a small Vatican cemetery for long-dead German kings. Incredibly, the Vatican, which previously refused to participate in the investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance, agreed to the opening of the tombs. But the graves were empty; even the remains of the German princesses who were to be buried there were missing.
In January 2023, just months after the documentary was released, the Vatican announced it would launch an investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance and said last week it had uncovered new leads “worthy of further investigation,” according to the Associated Press . Prosecutors in Rome have also reopened the case, and now, just days after Pope Francis recognized it, the Italian parliament could soon launch a formal inquiry into the case.
“A taboo has fallen,” the Orlandi family attorney told the AP. “It was not a matter of course and we are grateful to Pope Francis for this gesture.”