Pope Francis weighed into a decades-old Vatican scandal on Sunday, rejecting insinuations that the late Pope John Paul II sought out underage girls to molest.
The Pontiff’s comments were in relation to the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old girl who lived in the Vatican and failed to return home on June 22, 1983.
Her disappearance 40 years ago – after a music lesson in Rome – is one of Italy’s most enduring mysteries, and entered a new chapter on Tuesday when her brother Pietro Orlandi met with Vatican chief prosecutor Alessandro Diddi – who Francis himself has given free rein to get to the bottom of the case.
After speaking to Diddi for more than eight hours, Pietro appeared on a television programme where he played part of an audio recording with the voice of a man Orlandi said was part of an organised crime group that Italian media have for decades speculated may have been involved in his sister’s disappearance.
The voice of the alleged gangster says that more than 40 years ago, girls were brought into the Vatican to be molested – and that Pope John Paul would go out looking for underage girls.
Pope Francis weighed into a decades-old Vatican scandal on Sunday, rejecting insinuations that the late Pope John Paul II (pictured in 1978) sought out underage girls to molest
The Pontiff’s comments on Sunday were in relation to the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old girl who lived in the Vatican and failed to return home on June 22, 1983
Orlandi then said in his own words on the show: ‘They tell me Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II’s surname) used to go out in the evenings with two Polish monsignors and it certainly was not to bless houses’.
The comments caused a storm and were condemned by Vatican officials in the past few days before the pope himself entered the fray at his noon address to about 20,000 people in St. Peter’s Square.
‘Certain that I am interpreting the sentiments of the faithful from all over the world, I express a grateful thought to the memory of St. John Paul, who in these days has been the object of offensive and unfounded insinuations,’ Francis said.
The mostly Italian crowd broke into applause.
Francis noted that in Sunday’s crowd in the square were pilgrims and other faithful in town to pray at a sanctuary for divine mercy, a quality John Paul stressed often in his papacy, which spanned from 1978 to 2005.
Diddi summoned Pietro’s lawyer, Laura Sgro, on Saturday. The Vatican said she invoked attorney-client privileges.
Sgro told Reuters on Sunday that John Paul did not come up in her conversation with Diddi, adding in a text message: ‘I have never questioned the sanctity of John Paul II’.
Sgro insisted her client wasn’t accusing anyone.
Pietro Orlandi – who has vowed to discover what happened to his sister – told Reuters on Sunday by telephone that it was ‘correct that Francis defended John Paul II’.
Orlandi added that during the television appearance he was ‘repeating what others had said. I certainly did not see it myself’.
The Vatican’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, earlier condemned Orlandi’s comments as a ‘sleazy’ vilification of the pontiff, who was declared a saint in 2014.
‘No one deserves to be vilified in this way, without even a shred of a clue, on the basis of the ‘rumours’ of some unknown figure in the criminal underworld or some sleazy anonymous comment produced on live TV,’ Tornielli said.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was John Paul’s secretary throughout his leadership, called Orlandi’s actions ‘ignoble, unrealistic, laughable if they were not tragic, even criminal’.
Emanuela vanished on June 22, 1983, after leaving her family´s Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson in Rome. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See.
Over the past four decades tombs have been opened, bones have been exhumed from forgotten grave sites and conspiracy theories have abounded.
Among the theories have been ones linking the disappearance to the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt against John Paul in 1981 in St. Peter’s Square or to the international financial scandal over the Vatican bank.
Still other theories envision a role played by Rome’s criminal underworld.
Pope Francis on Sunday (pictured) condemned comments by Emanuela Orlandi’s brother, in which he insinuated that Pope John Paul II sought out underage girls to moles
People gather on the day Pope Francis leads Regina Caeli prayer at the Vatican, April 16
Pictured: A banner is seen in the crowd in the Vatican in support of Pope John Paul II, April 16
Pictured: Emanuela Orlandi’s brother Pietro Orlandi is seen in the Vatican (file photo) in 2019
The case, which has been the subject of on-and-off investigations in Italy and the Vatican, has drawn fresh worldwide attention following the release late last year of the Netflix series ‘Vatican Girl’.
The series explored those possible scenarios and provided new testimony from a friend who said Emanuela had told her a week before she disappeared that a high-ranking Vatican cleric had made sexual advances toward her.
She would be 55 now.
Her brother has long insisted the Vatican knows more than it has said.
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