ROME – The brother of Emanuela Orlandi, the famous “Vatican girl” whose fate remains the most notorious unsolved mystery in modern Italy, initially expressed hope that a Vatican investigation into his sister’s disappearance more than 40 years ago would reflect “Pope Francis’ desire for the truth.” But now he is expressing “distrust” of the investigation.

“I have no confidence in the Vatican’s investigations,” said Pietro Orlandi, Emanuela’s older brother, on August 24 at a meeting in Sicily dedicated to the fight against violence against women.

Instead, Orlandi said, his hope now rests on two other parallel investigations into his sister’s case, one led by the Attorney General in Rome and the other by a bipartisan panel of the Italian parliament.

“Hope to find out the truth is growing,” Orlandi said, despite his skepticism about the Vatican. “It is important to talk about this in schools because I find young people have a sense of justice that adults often do not have.”

Orlandi also denied recent speculation in the Italian media about an alleged private meeting with Pope Francis, saying the only time he met the pontiff was outside the Vatican’s St. Anne’s Church a few days after his election in April 2013.

“Despite many requests, I was never given the opportunity to have a private meeting with the Pope,” Orlandi said.

The 1983 disappearance of Emanuel Orlandi, whose father was a minor official in the prefecture of the papal household and whose family lived in an apartment in the Vatican near the Swiss Guard barracks, has become a magnet for speculation and conspiracy theories over the years. The case has been variously linked to the 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul II, the Vatican banking scandals of the 1980s, alleged links between the Vatican and the Mafia, and rumors of a paedophile ring in the Vatican.

The popularity of a 2022 Netflix documentary about the Orlandi affair, titled “Vatican Girl,” put new pressure on civil and ecclesiastical authorities to take a closer look. In January 2023, the Vatican’s top prosecutor, veteran Italian lawyer Alessandro Diddi, announced that his office would launch an investigation.

At the time, Orlandi and family lawyer Laura Sgrò welcomed this development. In April 2023, Orlandi met with Diddi for eight hours, during which he handed him, among other things, a dossier of information he had collected over the years. This included a list of high-ranking Vatican officials who he believed should be questioned.

“I am satisfied because I was finally able to explain all the things that need to be investigated,” Orlandi said after the session. “Diddi assured me that it is his wish to get to the bottom of things in search of the truth, without making any concessions for anyone.”

However, this optimism was short-lived.

Just two months later, Diddi appeared before an Italian Senate commission to protest against the establishment of a parliamentary investigation, a move Orlandi strongly supported.

“I believe that opening a third investigation that follows a different logic and methods than the judicial authorities would at this time be a dangerous interference with the integrity of the investigations already underway,” Diddi told the Senate.

“An excessive interest in public opinion can undermine the integrity of our work in cooperation with the public prosecutor’s office in Rome,” he said.

These statements did not go down well with Orlandi. He urged Parliament to maintain its independence and continue its own investigations. As more time passed without any indication of new findings from the Vatican, Orlandi publicly criticized them.

“The pope has the power to disclose everything there is to find. So it’s not a question of simply saying, ‘Open a file and investigate.’ If he wanted to, Pope Francis would have the power to enforce disclosure, and I’m sure that would be appreciated by everyone,” Orlandi said in the fall of 2023.

The following January, the month in which Orlandi holds his annual sit-in to commemorate his sister’s birthday on January 14, he called Diddi’s investigation a “farce.”

His comments in Sicily are thus in line with the growing distrust between the Vatican under Pope Francis and the Orlandi family, although Pietro insists that the family will carry on.

“We will never accept my sister’s disappearance,” he said at the gathering in Sicily. “We will continue to fight to find out the truth.”

During the recent hearing of the parliamentary panel, former Roman prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo, who investigated Orlandi’s disappearance in the 1980s, suggested that the late Roman mafia boss Enrico De Pedis, known as “Renatino”, may have been involved in the case for “personal motives”.

Over the years, De Pedis has been linked to the case for other reasons, sometimes involving Pope John Paul II and the Vatican Bank. Capaldo, however, dismissed such theories, saying he merely facilitated the handover of Emanuela from her original abductors to other, unidentified parties.