VATICAN CITY — The Vatican on Wednesday sought to tamp down the most recent tempest over the 1983 disappearance of a Vatican worker’s teenage daughter, after an Italian broadcaster claimed a brand new scoop within the investigation that the household instantly dismissed.
The thriller of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi’s disappearance has horrified and intrigued Italians for 4 many years and obtained renewed curiosity following the airing final 12 months of the Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl.”
Orlandi vanished June 22, 1983 after leaving her household’s Vatican City condominium to go to a music lesson in Rome. Theories over time have linked her disappearance to the whole lot from the plot to kill St. John Paul II to a monetary scandal involving the Vatican financial institution and Rome’s legal underworld
This 12 months, each the Vatican and the Rome prosecutors’ workplace reopened their investigations into the chilly case. The Italian Parliament is also poised to open a bicameral fee of inquiry in hopes of lastly fixing one of many Vatican’s enduring mysteries and bringing closure to the Orlandi household.
Amid renewed curiosity within the case, Italian tv channel La7 claimed an unique growth within the investigation this week. The broadcaster cited a decades-old trade of letters that referenced an obvious case of an Orlandi uncle making undesirable sexual advances towards one among Emanuela’s sisters in 1978. The suggestion was that the uncle, who has since died, may need been concerned in Emanuela’s disappearance.
Within hours of the published, Orlandi relations and their lawyer, Laura Sgro, organized a information convention to dismiss the story and to denounce La7 for having publicly recognized the sister as an alleged sufferer of sexual misconduct.
The sister, who had by no means advised her household concerning the uncle’s conduct, advised reporters the alleged advances had been nothing greater than verbal feedback made when she was 21. She stated they by no means amounted to something and stopped instantly after she made her disinterest clear.
The sister stated she had advised her then-boyfriend and the household’s non secular director on the time, and in addition investigators in 1983, however thought-about the entire episode insignificant. Investigators interrogated the uncle on the time however dismissed him as a potential suspect in Emanuela’s disappearance as a result of he was 200 kilometers (123 miles) away from Rome with household on the day {the teenager} went lacking.
In a press release Wednesday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni confirmed that Vatican prosecutors had turned over to Italian prosecutors the documentation that they had acquired throughout their investigation. He stated the Holy See hoped to seek out the reality, “and that all hypotheses of investigation are explored.”
He responded to Orlandi household strategies that the non secular adviser may need violated the seal of confession by revealing the sister’s story within the trade of letters referenced by La7. Bruni stated the “correspondence in question expressly indicates that there was no violation of the sacramental seal of Confession.”
The growth marked simply the most recent spasm of headlines and recriminations which have erupted because the investigations had been reopened, proof of the large maintain the Orlandi thriller nonetheless has on Italy.
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