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MALTATODAY 15 January 2023

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12 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 JANUARY 2023 MATTHEW VELLA THE Vatican has reopened an investigation into the disap- pearance of Emanuela Orlandi, a case that has gripped Italy for almost 40 years and embroiled the powerful Holy See but has now acquired a newfound in- terest: the Netflix audience. The inquiry comes months af- ter the release of Vatican Girl, a documentary exploring a num- ber of hypotheses in an attempt to unravel the 1983 mysterious kidnapping of the 15-year-old Orlandi who was a Vatican cit- izen. In Malta, Vatican Girl made the top-10 for three weeks run- ning, its audience piqued by a secret of scandalous propor- tions that calls into question the impeachability of the Holy See – even months after the vis- it of Pope Francis, possibly one of the pontiffs who knows, but will not say, the truth about the disapperance of Orlandi. The academic and journalist Fr Joe Borg is one of the few – perhaps only – Catholic voices who expressed a kind of per- sonal concern about the rami- fications for the Vatican as this decades-old scandal returns to haunt the Holy See from our television screens. "It's bad news," he told Mal- taToday just a few weeks after the airing of Vatican Girl back in November. "What is bad news for the Vatican is not just bad news for the world's small- est state... but bad news for the Catholic Church and the 1.3 billion believers." The Orlandi case is a typical 'mistero d'Italia': deathly si- lence from the Vatican about its links to underground financ- ing and the Roman underworld of the Magliana gang, and for good measure, a dastardly mythomaniac derailing the in- vestigation with false evidence – all familiar tropes in Italy's latter-day history of crime and politics, easily the stuff of Dan Brown novels. Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican bank functionary, dis- appeared in 1983 on her way to a music lesson. Her body has never been found, and the truth about what happened to her has puzzled investigators since then. Intrigue is part and parcel of the Vatican, a royal court of car- dinals and priests that jealously guard centuries-long secrets on the papal territory of less than half a kilometre squared, with its own citizens – population 453 – issued a passport, enjoy- ing its own territorial gendar- merie, as well as observer status at the United Nations. But the Vatican's organisation is diametrically to the values represented in other modern European and liberal nations: it is not a democracy, it lacks any modicum of transparency that would be otherwise found in a listed corporation, and histori- cally wages war on modern civil liberties. With its historic cul- ture of secrecy on the clerical sexual abuse of minors, and ev- idence that its IOR (Istituto per le Opera Religiose) laundered mafia cash, the make-up of the Holy See itself is simply ripe for scandal and skulduggery. Vatican Girl starts off with the theory that Orlandi was kid- napped in a botched attempt by the Magliana gang to force the Holy See to release mafia money held inside the Vatican bank, which the Roman Pontiff – John Paul II – and his shady money-man Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, had been funnel- ling to anti-communism move- ments. The timing of the kid- napping, on the day the Pope returns from Poland where he met the Solidarnosc trade un- ion – secretly funded by Rome – seems to be pregnant with meaning. The Orlandi family is convinced the Holy Father and his top Vatican men know, but will not say, what informed the kidnapping and what happened to Emanuela. Then in 1990, a tip-off to the family alerts them to a 'secret' tomb inside the ba- silica Sant'Apollinare in Rome – it contains none other than the body of murdered Magliana boss Enrico De Pedis. Orlandi's remains were not found in that tomb, but a jour- nalist tracks down the late ma- fia boss's fiancé, who admits that weeks after the kidnapping, De Pedis ordered here to hand over young Emanuela to an un- known priest, who takes her in a chauffered car and drives off – the last known sighting of Or- landi. There are two crucial develop- ments from the Netflix docuse- ries that suggests John Paul II, Benedict XVI and even Francis have withheld the truth about Orlandi. In 2017, journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi obtained a secret document showing that the Vatican spent 500 million Italian lire to keep Or- landi away from the city state between 1983 and 1997 – the Vatican strongly denied the au- thenticity of the document. But it is in the final episode that Netflix offers the theory that the Vatican was involved in some way in Orlandi's disap- pearance, based on a new inter- view with a childhood friend of the missing girl, who says she had suffered the unwanted sex- ual advances of a Vatican cleric, right in the vast Vatican gar- Netflix's Vatican Girl challenges Catholics with Holy See's silence Now that the Vatican is reopening the Emanuela Orlandi inquiry, will Catholic viewers of the Netf lix docu-series on the Emanuela Orlandi mystery, demand that the Roman Catholic Church drop its intransigence on the case "The Vatican's refusal to answer the questions of the producers will surely be interpreted by most as a confirmation that the Vatican is hiding the truth. 'Chi tace consente', says an old Italian adage"

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