Upswing in the Orlando affair: The investigation could focus on the family drama. For forty years, the legal conundrum has unconsciously occupied the Italian collective. In France, the case is mostly known to fans of news reports or thanks to La Disparue du Vatican, the documentary released on Netflix this fall. This series, based on the testimony of Emanuela Orlandi’s relatives, journalists and people who claim to have been involved in the kidnapping, presents the various hypotheses put forward to solve the mystery.
On June 22, 1993, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican citizen, was last seen following a music lesson in central Rome. Since then, this affair has given rise to countless speculations, against the background of conspiracy theories involving secret services, the mafia, the high Vatican authorities or Freemasonry.
exchange of letters
Now all eyes are on the family trail. According to private Italian television channel La7, the Vatican prosecutor recently handed his Roman counterpart an exchange of letters between Foreign Minister Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican’s deputy, and a priest, a former spiritual advisor to the Orlandi family, in September 1983.
Its purpose: to obtain confirmation that Natalina, the older sister of the disappeared, was sexually abused by her uncle Mario Meneguzzi, who has since died. The confessor realizes that the young girl had confessed to him. She was forbidden to speak, otherwise she would lose her post in the Chamber of Deputies, where her uncle, who ran the bar, had hired her some time earlier. These facts were known to the investigators at the time because, according to La7, they had been confirmed by direct testimony from Natalina Orlandi.
Emanuela’s relatives blame the Holy See
Italian media reported on Tuesday that Mario Meneguzzi was close to internal security services at the time, had answered certain anonymous calls from the Orlandi family and evaded a surveillance he was aware of without investigators knowing how. Finally, the composite portrait of the man seen with Emanuela Orlandi on June 22, 1983, the day of his disappearance is similar.
However, Emanuela’s brother Pietro, his sister Natalina and their lawyer Laura Segro, under whose pressure the Vatican and then the Rome public prosecutor’s office reopened the file in 2023, do not believe it. They accuse the Holy See of wanting to “exonerate” itself from its supposed responsibility in this matter. You have to give a press conference in Rome this Tuesday afternoon.