Vatican weighs in on latest 'Vatican Girl' tempest after investigations are reopened

The Vatican on Wednesday sought to tamp down the latest tempest over the 1983 disappearance of a Vatican employee’s teenage daughter, after an Italian broadcaster claimed a new scoop in the investigation that the family immediately dismissed.

The mystery of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi’s disappearance has horrified and intrigued Italians for four decades and received renewed interest following the airing last year of the Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl.”

Orlandi vanished June 22, 1983 after leaving her family’s Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson in Rome. Theories over the years have linked her disappearance to everything from the plot to kill St. John Paul II to a financial scandal involving the Vatican bank and Rome’s criminal underworld

This year, both the Vatican and the Rome prosecutors’ office reopened their investigations into the cold case. The Italian Parliament also is poised to open a bicameral commission of inquiry in hopes of finally solving one of the Vatican’s enduring mysteries and bringing closure to the Orlandi family.

Amid renewed interest in the case, Italian television channel La7 claimed an exclusive development in the investigation this week. The broadcaster cited a decades-old exchange of letters that referenced an apparent case of an Orlandi uncle making unwanted sexual advances toward one of Emanuela’s sisters in 1978. The suggestion was that the uncle, who has since died, might have been involved in Emanuela’s disappearance.

Within hours of the broadcast, Orlandi family members and their lawyer, Laura Sgro, organized a news conference to dismiss the story and to denounce La7 for having publicly identified the sister as an alleged victim of sexual misconduct.

The sister, who had never told her family about the uncle's behavior, told reporters the alleged advances were nothing more than verbal comments made when she was 21. She said they never amounted to anything and stopped immediately after she made her disinterest clear.

The sister said she had told her then-boyfriend and the family’s spiritual director at the time, and also investigators in 1983, but considered the whole episode insignificant. Investigators interrogated the uncle at the time but dismissed him as a possible suspect in Emanuela's disappearance because he was 200 kilometers (123 miles) away from Rome with family on the day the teenager went missing.

In a statement Wednesday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni confirmed that Vatican prosecutors had turned over to Italian prosecutors the documentation they had acquired during their investigation. He said the Holy See hoped to find the truth, “and that all hypotheses of investigation are explored.”

He responded to Orlandi family suggestions that the spiritual adviser might have violated the seal of confession by revealing the sister’s story in the exchange of letters referenced by La7. Bruni said the “correspondence in question expressly indicates that there was no violation of the sacramental seal of Confession.”

The development marked just the latest spasm of headlines and recriminations that have erupted since the investigations were reopened, evidence of the enormous hold the Orlandi mystery still has on Italy.