Girl from the Vatican: The Pope remembered Emanuele Orlando

He pope Francis reminded today Emanuel Orlandoa young woman who disappeared 40 years ago and whose case is one of the great unsolved enigmas in Italy, when she expresses her “closeness” to the family of the so-called “girl from the vatican”.

“These days are the 40th anniversary of the disappearance Emanuel Orlando. I want to take advantage of this circumstance to once again express my closeness to his relatives, especially his mother, and to assure him of my prayers,” said the Pope at the end of the Sunday Angelus prayer.

“I remember all the families who bear the pain of a missing loved one,” he added.

Among the thousands of believers who gathered in St. Peter’s Square to listen to Francis were some of the young woman’s relatives, such as her brother Pietro Orlandi, that he expressed hope that the pope would say something about Emanuela this Sunday and organized a protest that ended right in the Vatican.

“I hope that the Pope can express a few words of hope that we will get to the truth, and I honestly have no doubt that they will come, because he opened this investigation, which means that there is his will. to clarify things,” he told EFE on Wednesday.

According to Orlandi, these Pope’s words are a “very positive” gesture that can help promote the investigation into the disappearance of the young woman on June 22, 1983.

Last Thursday, exactly 40 years after the disappearance, the Vatican’s justice system revealed it had found “some lines of inquiry worth exploring” by announcing that it had handed over Roman prosecutor’s office all the documentation he has collected in recent months about the case.

Promoter (Prosecutor) of Justice of the Vatican City, Alessandro Didi, reopened the investigation at the end of 2022, a few months before the prosecutor’s office in Rome also launched a new investigation last May, after two previous ones were unsuccessful.

Orlandi was a Vatican citizen (her father was an employee of the Holy See and lived inside the Vatican walls) who disappeared at the age of 15 when she left home to attend music lessons in Rome and became one of Italy’s great mysteries. history.

His disappearance was linked in various journalistic investigations to the attack on John Paul II in 1981 Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican in the hands of the Turkish terrorist Ali Agca, as well as the network of pedophiles and the Banda della Magliana, the Roman mafia of the 70s and 80s.

Although none of the investigations yielded results, his family did not get tired of seeking the truth and justice, and Pietro Orlandi was heard for the first time on April 12 by the Vatican prosecutor, to whom he handed over all the information he had and requested that all the cardinals and people in the Curia who might know what happened.

“It is a huge injustice, especially when it is known that there are people who know what happened, so I will never be able to come to terms with it, even if forty years have passed. Our goal is to find the truth and achieve justice for my sister,” he said. . EFE Orlando.