‘Vatican Girl’ panel hears former Vatican top cop, snubs Ali Ağca

ROME – Testifying before an Italian parliamentary commission Nov. 21, a former commander of the Vatican’s police force confirmed that he put together a folder in 2012 at the request of Archbishop Georg Gänswein, secretary to Pope Benedict XVI, and of the Secretariat of State, on the case of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee who disappeared in June 1983.

Domenico Giani, head of the Vatican gendarmes from 2006 to 2019, said that file was simply an “historical reconstruction” of the Orlandi case that didn’t contain any new information.

“The Holy See did not undertake any investigative activity,” he said, stressing that at the time of the disappearance, the case was handled by Italian authorities.

“I am not a witness to anything,” he told the commission.

Giani also confirmed that he had several meetings in 2012 with a Roman prosecutor regarding the relocation of the remains of mob boss Enrico De Pedis from the Roman Basilica of Sant’Apollinare. Over the years, De Pedis has been linked in various reconstructions to the disappearance of Orlandi.

At the same time, the panel declined to hear testimony from Mehmet Ali Ağca, the would-be assassin of St. John Paul II in 1981. Ali Ağca has long claimed his case was somehow linked to Orlandi’s, though over the years he’s given shifting and contradictory accounts regarding what he claims actually happened.

Now living in Istanbul, Ali Ağca had requested to be heard by the parliamentary body through his attorney but was turned down.

Lawyer Laura Sgrò, who represents the Orlandi family, said Giani’s testimony confirmed two points which Pietro Orlandi, the older brother of Emanuela, has insisted upon for years: First, that there is a “Vatican file” on Orlandi, and second, that Giani had indeed met with prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo regarding the opening of the De Pedis tomb.

When asked about those meetings in the past, Capaldo, who worked in the Roman prosecutor’s office from 1972 to 2017, had always referred to 2012 encounters with two “emissaries” of the Vatican without divulging their identities.

Capaldo also claimed these emissaries referred to Orlandi as already dead in the course of conversation, suggesting the Vatican knew more about the case than it had ever revealed.

Over the last 40 years, the fate of Orlandi has become the Italian equivalent of the Kennedy assassination, generating an enormous volume of theories and conspiracy theories of all sorts. Many have involved the Vatican, given that Orlandi’s father was a minor official in the Prefecture of the Papal Household at the time of her disappearance and the family lived in a Vatican apartment.

Popular fascination with the case was revived by the 2022 Netflix documentary series “Vatican Girl,” which created enough momentum that three different new investigations have been launched: One by the Vatican’s Promoter of Justice, one by the Roman prosecutor’s office, and the parliamentary commission, which includes representatives of all political parties from both the Italian house and the senate.

Sgrò insisted that despite Giani’s attempts to minimize the significance of the file he mentioned, it nevertheless has to be “the fruit of investigatory activity.” She also said that the Orlandi family, especially Pietro Orlandi, has been asking the Vatican for a copy of the file for years, generally to be told that such a document doesn’t exist.

As for De Pedis, when he died in 1990 his remains were entombed in Sant’Apollinare at the request of his widow, who said the couple had been married there and that De Pedis remained a benefactor of the church throughout his life.

When it became public knowledge in the late 1990s that he was buried in a major Roman basilica, it generated enormous scandal. Some speculated that the tomb had been a payoff by the Vatican for a presumed role by De Pedis in covering up Orlandi’s fate.

Eventually the tomb was opened in 2012, and no trace of Orlandi was discovered. De Pedis’s remains were cremated at the widow’s request and scattered in the Mediterranean Sea.

Here too, Sgrò said, the Orlandi family had repeatedly asked the Vatican to identify the individuals who met with Capaldo since 2017, without any response. Such omissions, she said, undercut claims by Giani of a desire to collaborate.

“Collaboration means working together, and unfortunately this hasn’t been the case,” she said. “The Orlandi family thanks the commission for the work it’s doing, and it hopes that other steps forward will be taken as soon as possible in the search for the truth about the kidnapping of Emanuela.”

As for Ali Ağca, he told Italian media that the Orlandi disappearance occurred at the behest of a mysterious secret cabal within the Vatican called “Entity,” which, he said, is one of the names for Satan, confirming that the case is somehow linked to the Madonna of Fatima, who, he said, “predicted” the assassination attempt against John Paul II.

Pope Francis could reveal the truth about Orlandi tomorrow, he said, but doing so would be opposed by “Entity, Opus Dei and other conservative sectors of the Vatican that want absolute silence on this mystery that’s been imprisoning them spiritually and morally for 41 years, and which will ruin the coming Jubilee.”