I was reading a couple of Italian commentaries today reviving the Emmanuela Orlandi kidnapping case that strikes me as a case of Holy Week opportunism - the theory held by some American Catholic commentators that MSM always manage to come up with some bombshells to throw at the Church or the Vatican during Holy Week, as a way of holding up Christianity to ridicule just when the Christian world is celebrating the founding mystery of the faith.
But I see the London Telegraph has some version of the story which does give the basic background. I have posted a couple of times before about this long-running 'Vatican mystery' since the coals were raked over last year by the brother of the kidnapped teenager, who organized an online write-in campaign demanding that Benedict XVI reopen the investigation into the crime and disclose everything that the Vatican knows about the case.
Of course, this is another one of those 'scandals' being laid at the door of Benedict XVI even if he had nothing whatsoever to do with the case. The Corriere commentary seems like an attempt to force him to 'reopen' the case, saying he ought to throw light on it as he did on the sex abuse cases against priests. But the latter was within his control and competence to do. In the Orlandi case, if no one could get an answer from the Vatican in all those 21 years during John Paul's time, what are the chances that anyone who does know anything about it would open up now for Benedict XVI? And if any re-investigation comes to the same dead end, everyone will still say anyway that the Vatican is indulging in its 'usual cover-up'.
Raking over long-banked embers:
Vatican accused of cover-up over
teenager's 1983 disappearance
By Nick Squires, Rome
03 Apr 2012
Prosecutors in Rome say that “someone in the Vatican” knows the fate of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee who vanished in June 1983.
Her kidnap in Rome by unidentified men has been the subject of scrutiny for three decades, with allegations that it was connected to blackmail and banking scandals involving the Holy See.
One theory is that the girl’s father, a Vatican employee, had stumbled on documents that connected the Vatican’s bank with organised crime in Rome and that she was seized in an attempt to silence him. The alleged mastermind of the kidnapping was Enrico “Renatino” De Pedis, the leader of the Magliana gang, Rome’s most ruthless criminal band.
He was shot dead by rival gangsters in a street in central Rome in 1990 and his body interred in a crypt in the Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare. It has always been seen as highly unusual that a known mafioso should have been given the honour of being buried in a church in which popes and cardinals are interred.
There has been speculation that Miss Orlandi was murdered and her remains hidden in the tomb alongside De Pedis.
Prosecutors in Rome have for the first time explicitly pointed the finger at the Vatican, saying that senior cardinals are covering up the truth.
Giancarlo Capaldo, a senior prosecutor who is investigating the case, said he had found evidence that serving members of the Curia — the Vatican’s governing body — knew much more than they were saying about Emanuela’s disappearance.
“There are people still alive, and still inside the Vatican, who know the truth,” the prosecutor was quoted as saying by Corriere della Sera.
[I find this a fishy attempt to try and implicate Benedict XVI somehow in this supposed cover-up, since he came to the Vatican in 1982 and would therefore have been in the Curia at least a year when the kidnapping took place. But he was notorious during all his time in the Curia as being a loner, who was never part of any cabal or faction in the Curia. In fact, his only apparent contact in the 'inner circle' was John Paul II himself, and he was never intimate with either Cardinal Sodano nor then Mons. Dsiwisz.]
Pietro Orlandi, Miss Orlandi’s brother, seized on the remarks, saying it was time for the Vatican to come clean and calling on investigators to open the tomb of De Pedis to establish whether it contained his sister’s remains.
“The Holy See now has a moral duty to give a response after refusing for years to collaborate with the magistracy,” he said. “Their silence is becoming embarrassing.”
The Vatican insists that it has divulged all it knew about the case. “If someone on the inside had known something, they would have said,” said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, 78, who was number three in the Vatican Secretariat of State at the time. “We were all interested in clarifying the matter, but unfortunately we were not able to find out anything about it.”
[The #1 man at State at the time was Cardinal Agostino Casaroli (who died in 1998), John Paul II's Secretary of State from 1979-1990, who was suceeded by Cardinal Angelo Sodano. It was however, Sondao's first job at the Vatican itself. His previous career since 1959 had been spent in Apostolic Nunciatures abroad, and he was Nuncio to Pinochet's Chile from 1977 to 1988, when John Paul II named him deputy Secretary of State for relations with states, moving him up to Secretary of State when Casaroli retired in 1990. I haven't figured out a way to find out who were the other principal members of the Curia in 1983, but some Vaticanista should be able to come up with that so we can see who among them, other than Cardinal Re, are still around.]
Over the years it has been claimed that Emanuela’s kidnapping was carried out on the orders of a Catholic archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, the disgraced head of the Vatican bank, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione.
[He wasn't exactly disgraced. After the IOR scandal, John Paul II named him Governor of Vatican City State, a job he kept till 1990, when he retired.] The IOR was involved in the bankruptcy of Italy’s largest private bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, in 1982.
Its president, Roberto Calvi, nicknamed “God’s Banker”, was found hanged beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, with investigators unable to rule whether he had committed suicide or was murdered, possibly by the Mafia.
The Vatican has denied that Archbishop Marcinkus, who died in 2006, had anything to do with the teenager’s disappearance.
What this story does not report is the other major hypothesis about the kidnapping - that it was carried out by some Eastern European secret service to use the girl as a pawn in an attempt to secure early release from prison of Ali Agca. The latter has claimed, in fact, that the girl was taken to some monastery in Eastern Europe. Not that Agca's claim necessarily gives credibility to this hypothesis.... But the Telegraph reporter completely omits any mention of it, which seems more plausible, choosing to go with the anti-Vatican IOR-scandal-related theory, for obvious reasons. No one cares about the communist East Europe spy services anymore, but the Vatican is always fair game! And here's one more thing they can dump against IOR - even if this happened three decades ago - while it is in the final stages of its bid to be admitted to the European white list of transparent financial institutions.]