Pope Francis has remembered Emanuela Orlandi, the young woman who disappeared 40 years ago and whose case is one of the great unsolved enigmas in Italy, by expressing his “closeness” to the family of what is known as ‘the girl from the Vatican’.
“These days mark the 40th anniversary of the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. I want to take advantage of this circumstance to once again express my closeness to her relatives, especially her mother, and assure her of my prayers,” the pontiff said at the end of the prayer for Sunday angelus.
“I extend my memory to all the families who carry the pain of a missing loved one,” he added.
Among the thousands of faithful gathered in Saint Peter’s Square to listen to Francis were some relatives of the young woman, such as her brother Pietro Orlandi, who had expressed his hope that the Pope would say a word about Emanuela and had organized a demonstration that ended up precisely in the Vatican.
“I hope that the Pope can express a few words of hope so that we can reach the truth and I sincerely have no doubts that they will arrive, because it was he who opened this investigation, which means that there is a will on his part to clarify the things,” he said on Wednesday.
According to Orlandi, these words of the Pope are a “very positive” gesture that can help promote investigations into the disappearance of the young woman on June 22, 1983.
Last Thursday, exactly 40 years after the disappearance, the Vatican justice revealed that it had found “some lines of investigation worthy of being deepened” by announcing that it had handed over to the Rome Prosecutor’s Office all the documentation it had collected in recent months. about the case.
The Promoter (prosecutor) of Justice of the State of Vatican City, Alessandro Didi, reopened the investigation at the end of 2022, a few months before the Rome Prosecutor’s Office also launched a new investigation last May, after two previous ones without success.
Orlandi was a Vatican citizen (her father was an employee of the Holy See and lived within the Vatican walls) who disappeared at the age of 15 when she left home to attend her music classes in Rome and has become one of the great mysteries of Italian history.
His disappearance was related in various journalistic investigations to the attack against John Paul II in 1981 in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican at the hands of the Turkish terrorist Ali Agca, as well as talk of a 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 has not tired of demanding 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 in his possession and he asked that all cardinals and men in the curia who might know what happened be questioned.
“It is a huge injustice, especially when it is known that there are people who know what has happened, so I will never be able to accept it, even if forty years have passed. Our goal is to get to the truth and do justice to my sister,” he said. Orlandi.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
