Pope Francis remembered this Sunday Emanuela Orlandi, the young woman who lived in the Vatican and disappeared 40 years ago, expressing her “closeness” to the family, in a case considered one of the great unsolved enigmas in Italy.
“These days mark the 40th anniversary of the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. I would like to take this opportunity to once again express my closeness to his family, especially his mother, and assure him of my prayers”, said the pontiff, at the end of the Sunday Angelus prayer, adding: “I extend my memory to all the families who suffer the pain of losing a loved one.
Among the thousands of faithful gathered in Saint Peter’s Square were some of the missing girl’s relatives, such as Brother Pietro Orlandi, who had expressed the hope that the Pope would speak about Emanuela and had organized a demonstration that ended in the Vatican. .
“I hope that the Pope can express some words of hope so that we can get to the truth, and I sincerely have no doubt that they will come, because he was the one who opened this investigation, which means that there is a will on his part to clarify the things,” he said, in statements quoted by EFE, while highlighting the “very positive” gesture of the Pope to promote investigations into the disappearance of the young woman on June 22, 1983.
Last Thursday, exactly 40 years after the disappearance, the Vatican justice revealed that it had found “some lines of investigation that deserve to be deepened”, when it announced that it had handed over to the Rome Prosecutor’s Office all the documentation it had collected in recent months about the case.
The Vatican City State prosecutor, Alessandro Didi, reopened the investigation at the end of 2022, a few months before the Rome Prosecutor’s Office also launched a new investigation, last May, after two previous failed ones.
Daughter of a Holy See official and living within the walls of the Vatican, Emanuela Orlandi disappeared at the age of 15, when she left home to attend music classes in Rome, and became one of the great mysteries of Italian history.
The Pope also called on the faithful not to be “afraid” of not achieving the objectives that society “imposes” and stressed that the greatest fear is “throwing life overboard.”
“We must not waste the greatest asset we have: life. That alone should scare us. We have to go against the current, even if it costs, free ourselves from the conditioning of common thought, separate ourselves from those who ‘follow the wave’. ‘” the Pope said.
The Pope recalled that, today, a person can be ridiculed or discriminated against if they do not follow certain fashionable “models” that place second-order realities at the center, such as “things instead of people, services instead of the relationships”.
As examples, the Pontiff cited parents who live for work and need time for their children, priests and nuns committed to service without devoting time to Jesus or the commitments and requests of young people that distance them from other people.
Source: TSF
