Welcome to the Ending Explained for Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the latest true crime docuseries that arrives on Netflix this week. The docuseries tells the story of the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican citizen who was kidnapped and never seen ever again by her family or anyone else. The docuseries consists of four episodes filled with details and more twists than a Dan Brown novel. The series is one of the docuseries right now on Netflix.
The series has some truly incredibly solid production values. The graphic design department did a great job of creating visual aids for the story. The directing is also quite good and each episode reveals more and more information. At times, the story can truly take some unexpected turns, but it only shows that reality is often stranger than fiction. There are some truly terrifying revelations in the docuseries, and it also proposes its own theory about what happened to Emanuela.
The following paragraphs contain spoilers of Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi. Read at your own risk.
What Happened To Emanuela Orlandi?
Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi begins with a very solid introduction to the case. It paints the figure of Emanuela as a very normal girl living in the 80s in the Vatican. Her father worked at the Vatican, so he received a house to live inside the city-state walls. The Orlandi family describes their lives at the Vatican as fairly normal, and very similar to the lives of the people living in Italy. The only difference is that the Vatican closes its doors after midnight, so no one can get in or get out without the authorities’ permission.
Emanuela was living a normal day, in which she went to her music school for flute lessons. After going out of class, she called her house and her sister picked it up. She told her sister that a man had approached her on the street, but nothing more than that. The call was probably just a regular check-in. Let’s remember that at that time, there were no cell phones. This was the last thing the family heard from her, as she never came home after that. The search for Emanuela began very quickly after that, but it was in vain.
And then, came the phone call that change everything. A man called the Orlandi’s home, telling them that Emanuela was with his group. After some similar phone calls later, the kidnapper said that they would kill Emanuela unless they released Mehmet Ali Agca, the man responsible for trying to kill Pope John Paul II. From that point on, the Vatican became involved in the case, and it was never really able to detach from it, even when it clearly wanted to.
This is very strange because, the entire case was about the disappearance of one of its citizens, and yet, the city-state didn’t offer any cooperation about it. Only the Italian authorities were investigating, while the Vatican authorities simply watched as the story unfolded.
What New Revelations Open Up The Emanuela Case?
Emanuela has been missing for more than 37 years, and we still don’t know what happened to her. She remains the only Vatican citizen to ever be missing. There are no clues about her whereabouts, dead or alive. However, throughout the decades, there have been a lot of clues and breakthroughs that help paint the case in a new light and main point to the Vatican as a major holder of the information. It seems the Vatican knows exactly what is happening, but is trying to keep it a secret.
Why? Why would they keep such information out of the public’s eyes? Thanks to new clues, it seems that Emanuela held a major secret that could have destroyed the Church’s reputation. The first of these major breakthroughs was the Vatican leaks, a series of secret documents from the Vatican that were leaked to the public. In these documents, the Vatican is seen as a corrupt institution, mismanaging money by the millions and, of course, hiding its own faults, like the fact that it protects many of its members who dwell in pedophilia.
Right now, the talk of pedophilia inside the church seems to be a normal one. This vision has destroyed the reputation of the church in many people’s eyes, and yet in the 80s, something like that was unthinkable. Thanks to a series of documents, it seems that the Vatican paid for the withdrawal of Emanuela from Vatican soil. The Vatican apparently negotiated with the kidnappers, seized Emanuela, and took her to London, where Emanuela lived for at least 14 years of her life until she died and was translated back to the Vatican. They did all of this in secret.
The only thing speaking these facts is money. On top of that, new declarations from a childhood friend of Emanuela, have exposed another possible truth. That Emanuela was raped in some form by a high member of the church. The Italian Mafia had to deal with the Vatican, and they owned money, so they kidnapped Emanuela to blackmail the Vatican into paying for the money they owned. If someday, the truth of this is uncovered, it would destroy the reputation of the church in a huge way.
