Pope Francis has fully endorsed John Paul II, and assures that it has been the subject of conjectures “offensive and unfounded”. Francis thus alludes to the controversy sparked by some statements by Pietro Orlandibrother of the missing young vatican at age 15 in 1983. The case is now being reinvestigated by the Vatican.

“Sure of interpreting the sentiments of the faithful throughout the world, I address a grateful thought to the memory of Saint John Paul II, in these days the object of offensive and unfounded inferences”, the pontiff said after the Sunday prayer of the Regina Coeli, which between Easter Sunday and Pentecost replaces the traditional Angelus.

The thousands of faithful gathered in Saint Peter’s Square welcomed with a big applause for your wordswhich occur in the midst of a strong controversy between Orlandi and the Vatican.

The brother of the disappeared young woman has made some controversial statements on a television program in which, among other things, he insinuated that John Paul II used to leave the Vatican at night with some bishops to look for young people in Rome.

Specifically, in the broadcast, Orlandi, who has always fought to learn the fate of his sister and who this week has declared for the first time before the Vatican prosecutorassured that inside the Vatican it was known that John Paul II often left its walls with Polish monsignors and that there are those who say that “I wasn’t exactly going to bless houses“.

Following these statements, the official Vatican newspaper ‘L’Osservatore Romano’ branded Orlandi’s accusations “insanity”, which it described as a “media massacre that saddens and wounds the hearts of millions of believers and non-believers”, in the words of the editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See, Andrea Tornielli.

What happened to Emanuela Orlandi?

The controversy, which has continued in recent days with reproaches between the Orlandi family lawyer and the Vatican, has to do with one of the great mysteries of history Italian: the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi.

This is the case of a young Vatican citizen, as her father was an employee of the Holy See and lived within the Vatican walls, who disappeared in the center of Rome in June 1983.

The event, which has once again attracted attention after the premiere of the Netflix documentary ‘Vatican Girl’, was related in several journalistic investigations to the attack on John Paul II in 1981 in Saint Peter’s Square at the hands of the terrorist Ali Agca.

Other theories is that it could being a victim of a pedophile network or the Banda della Magliana, the Rome mafia of the 1970s and 1980s, which would have acted on the orders of the late American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, then director of the IOR, the Vatican bank. But none of the investigations have yielded results.