A latest true-crime documentary series on Netflix, “Vatican Girl,” tells the story of the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old girl who remains to be the one Vatican citizen considered missing.
The series examines the assorted testimonies by people involved with or claiming to be involved with the case, with the notable exception of any Vatican officials. After a montage where one person after one other claims that each lead within the investigation involves the Vatican ultimately and urges the institution to disclose any information it has, the ultimate screen notes: “The Vatican declined to be interviewed for this series.”
Here’s what it’s good to know in regards to the case and the revelations made within the four-part documentary series.
The fundamentals
Emanuela Orlandi was a 15-year-old girl who lived in an apartment in Vatican City together with her family, a few of whom had been employed by the Vatican and worked for popes for over a century. Her family are among the many few non-clerics granted official Vatican citizenship.
Orlandi’s family received a series of mysterious phone calls claiming she had been kidnapped for ransom and can be freed if Mehmet Ali Agca were released from prison.
On June 22, 1983, Emanuela left home for a flute lesson in the middle of Rome. She called home afterward to say she had been recruited to sell Avon beauty products after the lesson. She never returned.
Orlandi was allegedly last seen entering into a green BMW.
Within the months following her disappearance, Orlandi’s family received a series of mysterious phone calls claiming she had been kidnapped for ransom and can be freed if Mehmet Ali Agca, the person who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, were released from prison. The calls and subsequent testimonies from various individuals who claim to have been involved with the case have led to several theories across the motives for her disappearance; the 2 hottest being that she was either kidnapped by a world terrorist group linked to Agca or that the Italian Mafia had kidnapped her to be able to blackmail the Vatican for money after the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, the 12 months prior to Orlandi’s disappearance. The Vatican Bank, officially generally known as the Institute for the Works of Religion, was Banco Ambrosiano’s fundamental shareholder and was accused of using Banco Ambrosiano to funnel money to the Polish trade union Solidarity, contributing to the downfall of the Soviet Union.
There’s a compelling argument made that if what Orlandi’s friend says is true and was known by her captors, any proof might have been leveraged to blackmail the Vatican.
What’s latest
The most important twist in “Vatican Girl,” for individuals who have followed the almost-40-year-long mystery case, is an interview featured within the last episode of the series. A girl claiming to have been an in depth friend of the missing girl, who chooses to stay anonymous, claims that the week before she disappeared, Orlandi had confided to her that “someone near the pope” had been “bothering” her while she was walking within the Vatican Gardens. Orlandi’s friend said she had interpreted her friend’s confession to mean this person had made sexual advances toward Orlandi but didn’t elaborate on what she thinks happened or whether her friend had previously reported such behavior to her.
In one other interview, Emanuela’s brother, Pietro, says that Emanuela wouldn’t have told her parents if “a cardinal” were making sexual advances, because it could have jeopardized their father’s job as a messenger on the Vatican and possibly forced the family to maneuver out of their Vatican apartment. It’s unclear whether Pietro is speaking purely hypothetically when he says “cardinal” in his interview or whether he thinks a cardinal actually made such advances.
The documentary editors juxtapose these comments with photos of Emanuela as a young child and headlines about priests sexually abusing children, which appear to suggest to the viewer that the teenage girl might have been sexually abused from a young age, but not one of the interviews which are included within the show make that claim. There’s a compelling argument made that if what Orlandi’s friend says is true and was known by her captors—that somebody, possibly a cardinal near the pope, made advances on a minor in 1983, well before the church’s reckoning with sexual abuse—any proof might have been leveraged to blackmail the Vatican.
To today, the captors’ motives and Orlandi’s whereabouts remain unknown. A 1998 document, published in 2016 as a part of the VatiLeaks scandal, incorporates Vatican financial records referring to Miss Orlandi’s lodging at a hostel for women run by the Scalabrinian Missionaries, a spiritual institute of brothers and priests, in London. The last item within the document lists a final expense in July 1997 for “general activities and transfer to the Vatican City State with relative final paperwork.” A lawyer employed by Orlandi’s brother has interpreted this to mean that Orlandi’s body was returned to Vatican City without her family’s knowledge, although no stays matching hers have ever been declared as found, even after a tip-off led to the 2019 excavation of two graves within the Vatican’s Teutonic Cemetery and the invention of “1000’s of bones”—mostly fragments—in two ossuaries beneath the nearby Teutonic College.
The financial records leaked in 2016 appear to indicate that officials within the Vatican’s treasury office, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, knew where Orlandi was until not less than summer 1997, however the Vatican has never confirmed the reality of the data contained within the leaked document.
