JAKARTA - Pope Francis hopes that the mystery of the disappearance of the Vatican girl 40 years ago can be unconditionally revealed, as the case enters a new chapter on Tuesday, when the girl's brother meets with Vatican investigators authorized by the Pope to uncover the case.
Over the past four decades graves have been opened, bones have been dug up from forgotten burial sites, with conspiracy theories abounding in attempts to determine what happened to Emanuela Orlandi.
The daughter of a Vatican hostess whose family lives in the Vatican, Orlandi, then 15 years old, did not return home on June 22, 1983, after taking music lessons in Rome.
The case, which has been the subject of constant investigations in Italy and the Vatican, has attracted renewed worldwide attention, after Netflix released the series 'Vatican Girl' late last year.
In January, Vatican chief prosecutor Alessandro Diddi reopened an earlier inconclusive Vatican investigation after he inherited files from his retired predecessor.
In an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper ahead of the gathering, Diddi said Pope Francis wanted "the truth to emerge without any conditions". He said the Pope had a strong determination regarding the case.
Emanuela's older brother, Pietro, and family attorney, Laura Sgro, met with Diddi at the Vatican for more than five hours on Tuesday afternoon.
"We hope it can shed light on this episode and write a page of history," Sgro told reporters afterward, saying that the Vatican's openness and the Pope's determination were "absolutely positive".
Theories about Orlandi's disappearance have been rife. In the 1980s, the Italian media speculated that he had been kidnapped in an attempt to secure the freedom of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who was jailed in 1981 for trying to assassinate Pope John Paul II, though he had nothing to do with it and the allegations faded.
Other reports link it to the grave of Enrico De Pedis, a mobster buried in a Roman basilica. His grave was opened in 2012 but nothing has been revealed.
In an interview with Corriere della Sera, Diddi said the alleged link between the girl's disappearance and Rome's crime clan had been "over-evaluated".
In 2019, the Orlandi family received an anonymous letter saying Emanuela's body may be hidden among the dead in the Teutonic Cemetery, just inside the Vatican walls, where a statue of an angel holds a book marked "Requiescat in Pace," Latin for "Rest in Peace." .
Two tombs were opened and nothing was found, not even the bones of two 19th century princesses who were supposed to be buried there. They appear to have been moved during restructuring work decades before Orlandi was born.
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In 2018, bones were found during fieldwork at the Vatican embassy in Rome, sparking a media frenzy suggesting they might belong to Orlandi or Mirella Gregori, another teenager who disappeared that same year. However, the DNA test that was done at that time came back negative.
Last month, Italy's lower house approved the formation of a parliamentary commission to investigate the girls' disappearance.
Meanwhile, police have never ruled out the possibility that Orlandi may have been kidnapped and possibly killed for reasons unrelated to the Vatican, or been a victim of human trafficking.
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