Not long before she disappeared in the summer of 1983, Emanuela Orlandi went to Piazza del Catalone, a small square just outside of the Vatican walls, to meet friends.
There was still a party vibe during that sweltering June just a few weeks after AS Roma clinched the Serie A title. In a photograph taken at the time Orlandi, who was then 15, is wearing a headband in yellow and red, the football team’s colours, that her mother had made. It was one of the last photographs taken of the teenager before she vanished without trace on 22 June 1983, an image that has come to define the campaign of her older brother Pietro Orlandi’s unrelenting search for the truth.
“Emanuela was always here with friends,” he said in an interview with the Observer in Piazza del Catalone. “They were still celebrating; it was the last photo taken of her smiling.”
The disappearance of Emanuela – who has not been seen by her family since leaving her home within Vatican City, where her father was a lay employee in the papal household, for a flute lesson in Rome – has gripped Italy for four decades. But it was only in January this year that the powerful and inscrutable Holy See began its own investigation, with its promoter of justice, Alessandro Diddi, promising to leave no stone unturned in a mystery that has produced many theories, some of them outlandish, but no concrete facts. Prosecutors in Rome began collaborating with the Vatican on the probe this month.
“For 40 years there has never been a collaboration between the two,” said Orlandi, who recently caused controversy after insinuating that the much-revered Pope John Paul II might have been involved in his younger sister’s disappearance. “Until a few years ago the Vatican said it knew nothing, that she disappeared in Italy and so it needed to be investigated there. On the other hand, I’m told Rome has lots of documents. For all these years the Vatican has stayed silent – maybe this means someone there has proof of what happened.”
The Vatican’s investigation began a few months after the Netflix series, Vatican Girl, brought Emanuela’s case back under the global spotlight. The series explored theories that have emerged over the years, the first one being that she 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. Her disappearance has also been linked to a wave of financial scandals at the Vatican bank, an alleged sex ring run by Vatican police, and the mafia.
Another theory was that Emanuela was taken to London, where she lived for years in a youth hostel owned by a Catholic congregation, with her expenses funded by the Vatican. According to this hypothesis, she died in London before her body was transferred back to Rome and buried in the Vatican. In 2019, two tombs in the Vatican were reopened after a tipoff that Emanuela may have been buried there. No human remains were found.
But the new, and most startling, claim in the Netflix series came from a childhood friend of Emanuela, who said the teenager had confided in her about being molested by “someone close” to John Paul II.
“She said the conversation happened a few days before Emanuela disappeared and that [the alleged incident] took place in the Vatican gardens,” said Orlandi. That Emanuela might have been a victim of paedophilia is probably the most plausible theory, he added. “When you know in that environment they do certain things, maybe she was put in that situation?”
Orlandi’s determination to find the truth has irked the Vatican. In April, during questioning with Vatican prosecutors, he 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 subsequently 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.”
Pope Francis denounced the “offensive and unfounded insinuations” during his Sunday Angelus, while the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said the “anonymous, shameful accusations” were “madness”.
Orlandi claims the Vatican exploited the controversy to discredit him. “I have always said that I believe John Paul knew something,” he said. “But it was the person in the audio tape who used offensive words against him. I also gave the names of the two monsignors, who were close to John Paul. Everyone knew they would sometimes go out at night together. I simply added that their [outings] were not for religious reasons.”
He has also been left wondering if Pope Francis knew anything about his sister’s fate when, shortly after his election in 2013, the pontiff told him that Emanuela was “in heaven”.
“He told me these words, I don’t know why,” said Orlandi. “For [Joseph] Ratzinger [his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI], Emanuela was a taboo. So the fact that Francis used her name made me think he wanted to collaborate with me, but since then he has never wanted to meet again.”
Orlandi, who has three other sisters, described a privileged childhood within the Vatican walls, where they enjoyed the gardens and felt as if they were in “the safest place in the world”.
His pursuit of the truth is partly influenced by guilt. On the day she disappeared Emanuela had asked him to give her a lift to her flute lesson. “It was so hot in Rome, and I didn’t want to go,” he said. “She was a little angry, and left. I still wonder whether this would have happened if I had taken her.”
Time will tell if the investigation will bring the answers he needs. “For all these years we don’t know if Emanuela is alive or dead,” he said. “I will continue my battle to the very end.”
