Italy: Parliamentary inquest eyed for missing 'Vatican Girl'
ROME (AP) — Opposition lawmakers in Italy are seeking a parliamentary commission of inquiry into three cold cases that have consumed the Italian public's imagination for decades, including the 1983 disappearance of a 15-year-old that was highlighted in the Netflix documentary, “Vatican Girl.”
The aim of the inquest, said Sen. Carlo Calenda, would be to pressure the Vatican to finally turn over everything it knows about Emanuela Orlandi’s disappearance to Italian law enforcement authorities, saying its longstanding official claim of ignorance was “hardly credible.”
“We are a great secular nation that treats the Vatican with respect, but this case certainly cannot be considered closed in this way,” Calenda said Tuesday at a news conference announcing the proposed commission.
Orlandi vanished June 22, 1983 after leaving her family’s Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson in Rome. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See.
The Italian media and a quest by her brother, Pietro Orlandi, to find answers have kept her disappearance alive as an enduring Vatican mystery. Over the years, it has been linked to everything from the plot to kill St. John Paul II and a financial scandal involving the Vatican bank to Rome’s criminal underworld. The recent four-part Netflix documentary explored those scenarios.
Lawmakers and lawyers for Orlandi’s family and those of two other young women whose disappearance or deaths were never solved said Tuesday that the proposal for a commission of inquiry has been submitted to the lower Chamber of Deputies for an initial view and also would be filed in the Senate.
The idea must be voted on at the committee level. There was no indication how the center-right , which enjoys a comfortable majority in both houses, would vote.
Parliamentary...