Pietro Orlandi, the brother of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old girl and Vatican citizen who went missing 40 years ago, insinuated this week that John Paul II secretly left the Vatican at night to engage in immoral behavior.
Orlandi made the statement April 11 on the Italian television program Di Martedi, on which he appeared with his family’s lawyer, Laura Sgrò. Neither would disclose the source of the rumor.
Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, who was John Paul II’s personal secretary for over three decades, said this week the rumors were “vile insinuations” and “false from beginning to end.”
Orlandi, who has been trying to get answers to his sister’s disappearance for 40 years, met with the Vatican’s chief prosecutor for eight hours on April 11.
Alessandro Diddi, prosecutor for the Vatican City State, said that Pope Francis had granted him “maximum freedom of action to investigate [Orlandi’s case] on a broad scale without conditions of any kind.”
“Pope Francis tenaciously pursues the desire for absolute transparency, the search for truth and purification,” Diddi said in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera.
