Missing Vatican girl: Pope slams 'insinuations' against John Paul II as baseless

The Vatican pushed back hard Friday at “slanderous” insinuations against St John Paul II that were aired following the reopening of an investigation into the 1983 disappearance of the teenage daughter of a Vatican employee.

This comes as Emanuela Orlandi’s brother, Pietro, spent eight hours meeting with Vatican prosecutors last Tuesday, who earlier this year reopened the dormant investigation into Emanuela’s disappearance. The Vatican probe has coincided with the recent decision by Italy’s parliament to open a parliamentary commission of inquest into the case, giving the Orlandi family hope that the truth might finally emerge.

Emanuela Orlandi, 15, vanished on June 22, 1983, after leaving her family’s Vatican City apartment for a music lesson in Rome. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See.

Her disappearance has been one of the Vatican’s enduring mysteries. Over the years has been linked to everything from the plot to kill John Paul, to a financial scandal involving the Vatican bank and Rome’s criminal underworld.

The recent four-part Netflix documentary “Vatican Girl” explored those scenarios and also provided new testimony from a friend who said Emanuela had told her a week before she disappeared that a high-ranking Vatican cleric had made sexual advances toward her.

Pietro Orlandi has long insisted the Vatican knows more than it has said and has welcomed the reopening of the probe and promises by Vatican prosecutors that they have been given carte blanche to investigate “without reservations” to find the truth.

During his Tuesday interrogation, Pietro Orlandi provided Vatican prosecutors with an audiotape from a purported Roman mobster insinuating that John Paul would go out looking for underage girls to molest. He