Pope Francis has denounced “offensive and unfounded insinuations” that his predecessor John Paul II went out at night looking for underage girls.
The pope’s comments, made during his Angelus on Sunday in St Peter’s Square, were targeted at Pietro Orlandi, whose sister Emanuela vanished at the age of 15 in June 1983 while making her way home from a flute lesson in Rome.
The Orlandi family had lived in Vatican City, where her father was a lay employee in the papal household.
The investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance, which over the past four decades has triggered several theories but yielded no concrete answers, was reopened by the Vatican in January.
During questioning with Vatican prosecutors last week, Orlandi shared an audio tape containing an alleged conversation between a journalist and the boss of a Rome criminal organisation suspected of being embroiled in Emanuela’s disappearance. In the recording, the crime boss insinuated that the late John Paul II, whose original name was Karol Józef Wojtyła, would go out at night with senior clergymen in search of teenage girls.
Part of the audio was later aired on an Italian TV programme during an interview with Orlandi, in which he added: “They tell me that Wojtyła occasionally went out in the evening with two Polish monsignors, and it certainly wasn’t to bless homes.”
Orlandi was immediately condemned by the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which said in an editorial that the “anonymous, shameful accusations” were “madness”.
Francis’s stern rebuke on Sunday drew applause from his audience: “Confident of interpreting the sentiment of all the faithful of the entire world, I direct a grateful thought to the memory of St John Paul II, who in these days is the object of offensive and unfounded insinuations,” the pontiff said.
Orlandi claimed to LaPresse news agency that several people had informed him about John Paul II’s alleged outings, although the principal informant was now dead. He said he wasn’t accusing the former pope, who was made a saint in 2014, of abuse or paedophilia and shared the tape with prosecutors on the basis of them promising to leave no stone unturned in their investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance.
The reopened investigation followed the release on Netflix of Vatican Girl, a documentary exploring the theories surrounding the case.
One of the theories behind Emanuela’s disappearance was that the teenager was kidnapped by a gang in order to blackmail the Vatican into releasing Mehmet Ali Ağca, who was jailed in 1981 after trying to assassinate John Paul II.
In the most startling claim made in the Netflix documentary, a childhood friend of Emanuela said the teenager was molested by “someone close to the pope”, who at the time was John Paul II.
