Netflix’s Vatican Girl challenges Catholics with Holy See’s silence

The Vatican has reopened an investigation into the disappearance 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 interest: the Netflix audience.

The inquiry comes months after the release of Vatican Girl, a documentary exploring a number of hypotheses in an attempt to unravel the 1983 mysterious kidnapping of the 15-year-old Orlandi who was a Vatican citizen.

In Malta, Vatican Girl made the top-10 for three weeks running, its audience piqued by a secret of scandalous proportions that calls into question the impeachability of the Holy See – even months after the visit 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 personal concern about the ramifications for the Vatican as this decades-old scandal returns to haunt the Holy See from our television screens.

The Orlandi family believes John Paul II was aware of what had transpired in the investigations by Vatican police on the kidnapping, despite his reassurances that the Holy See was doing all it can to solve the case

“It’s bad news,” he told MaltaToday 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 smallest state... but bad news for the Catholic Church and the 1.3 billion believers.”

The Orlandi case is a typical ‘mistero d’Italia’: deathly silence from the Vatican about its links to underground financing and the Roman underworld of the Magliana gang, and for good measure, a dastardly mythomaniac derailing the investigation 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, disappeared 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 cardinals 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, enjoying its own territorial gendarmerie, as well as observer status at the United Nations.

The academic and journalist Fr Joe Borg is one of the few – perhaps only – Catholic voices who expressed a kind of personal concern about the ramifications for the Vatican as this decades-old scandal returns to haunt the Holy See from our television screens.

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 historically wages war on modern civil liberties. With its historic culture of secrecy on the clerical sexual abuse of minors, and evidence 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 kidnapped 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 funnelling to anti-communism movements. The timing of the kidnapping, on the day the Pope returns from Poland where he met the Solidarnosc trade union – 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 basilica 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 journalist tracks down the late mafia boss’s fiancé, who admits that weeks after the kidnapping, De Pedis ordered here to hand over young Emanuela to an unknown priest, who takes her in a chauffered car and drives off – the last known sighting of Orlandi.

Emanuela Orlandi

There are two crucial developments from the Netflix docuseries 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 Orlandi away from the city state between 1983 and 1997 – the Vatican strongly denied the authenticity 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 disappearance, based on a new interview with a childhood friend of the missing girl, who says she had suffered the unwanted sexual advances of a Vatican cleric, right in the vast Vatican gardens to which the city-state’s citizens had access to. Had Orlandi been kidnapped to cover up the scandal? Were the girls too ashamed to even report the matter to their own parents? It is this claim that the Vatican’s promoter of justice, Alessandro Diddi, will also be investigating.

Like many of its shocked viewers, especially Catholics who see a need for the Holy See’s moral unimpeachability in a modern age of global crises, Fr Joe Borg thinks the conclusion reached by millions of viewers will be that “rightly or wrongly... the Vatican was involved and that it is hiding the truth about the kidnapping of Orlandi.”

“Throughout the docuseries the alleged link with the Vatican is repeatedly asserted. The series then concludes with a very powerful AV montage where several participants allege that every hypothesis involves the Vatican. This is followed by the statement: ‘The Vatican declined to be interviewed for this series’,” he says.

“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”

Borg, one of the island’s veteran journalists, knows that the perception of millions around the world of the Vatican – historically linked to priestly sex abuse scandals, or the Vatican Bank’s money laundering scandal – is not a positive one.

“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,” Fr Borg says.

“It is indeed welcome news that now the Vatican has been announced that the Vatican’s Promotor of Justice, Alessandro Diddi, ‘has opened a file in response to requests made by the family in various settings.’ As they say, better late, than never. Some had justified the original silence of the Vatican describing it as a damage control exercise, that is, refusing to answer questions is less damaging than saying the truth. This is a very common tactic in PR and media relations.

“But I believe that while the Church should learn from the PR gurus of the world, it should be more guided by its Founder who taught that truth, not secrecy, sets us free.”