The Vatican's Secret Graveyard

10/28/2024

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
On October 29, 2018 renovations were being carried out in the Vatican close to the Villa Borghese. Builders were restoring a floor in the janitor's lodge. Considering the age of the buildings and the grounds, this type of work is commonplace, but not what was found which was a human skeleton.

Emanuela Orlandi

Once the story of the discovery was leaked to the Italian press, it was inevitable the name of Emanuela Orlandi would come up.

She was the daughter of a Vatican employee who disappeared on June 22, 1983. She had attended a flute lesson near the 7th-century courtyard of St. Apollinare Church, and was last seen getting into a dark green BMW.

Only fifteen years old when she disappeared, there have been several supposed sightings of Emanuela throughout the years.

Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's chief exorcist who died in 2016, claimed that through his work he had come across information that she was being kept as a sex slave inside the Vatican City walls.

In 2012, Amorth told La Stampa newspaper, "This was a crime with a sexual motive. Parties were organized with a member of the Vatican gendarmerie acting as the recruiter of the girls. The network involved diplomatic personnel from a foreign embassy to the Holy See. I believe Emanuela ended up a victim of this circle."

Discovery of Roberto Calvi's body under Blackfriars Bridge c.1982

The Orlandi family lived inside the historic Vatican City having access to the Vatican gardens.

Another theory regarding Emanuela's disappearance is that her father worked in the Vatican Bank, and that she was kidnapped to silence her father after he allegedly discovered information which connected Roberto Calvi (1920-1982), known as God's Banker to organized crime. Almost a year to the date before Emanuela's disappearance, Roberto Calvi was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London. His pockets were filled with cash and bricks, and his death was initially ruled a suicide.

Calvi belonged to the masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2) who referred to themselves as frati neri or "black friars". It was suspected he was murdered as a masonic warning because of symbolism to the word Blackfriars, where his body was found.

His body was examined several times to determine the cause of death. The last time it was exhumed in 1998, and a report was published in 2002, which confirmed earlier findings that Calvi could not have hanged himself due to lack of rust and paint on his shoes. Also his neck injuries were not consistent with hanging. In 2003, the London police re-opened the case.

More evidence unearthed, showed that prior to his death he stayed at Chelsea Cloisters. Sergio Vaccari, a drug dealer stayed in the same flat and 3 months after Calvi's death, he was found stabbed in the face, neck and chest more than 15 times. The dead man had masonic papers in his possession with the member names of P2. The murders of both men involved bricks stuffed in their clothing.

In October, 2005 five men were put on trial for Calvi's murder, which included his own bodyguard. They were all acquitted, due to the length of time after the crime, and the fact that there were many who wanted him dead including Vatican officials and Mafia figures.

Pietro Orlandi has always persisted in the search for his sister

If these possible culprits and conspiracies were not sinister enough, another one was tied to calls Emanuela's family started to receive in the days following her kidnapping. The caller said that she would be released if Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who shot and injured Pope John Paul II in 1981 was released.

The calls eventually stopped and Agca was pardoned and released in 2010. He said that Emanuela had been kidnapped by a Bulgarian gang, but did not add any further information, leaving the family no closer to finding her. The caller was believed to be mentally unstable.

In 2012, another attempt was made to solve the mystery of this poor girl's disappearance by opening the grave of Enrico "Renatino" De Pedis, a local mob boss who was interred in a crypt under Saint Apollinare Church. He was ambushed and murdered by rival gang members in 1990.

The belief was that Emanuela had been buried with him. The grave was opened and mysterious bones were found, but none were the young girl's. Another question arose, which was why a member of the Magliana crime family would be buried in a church owned by the Holy See. This was a church consecrated in 549 AD, and was built next to an ancient pagan cemetery.

It turned out the De Pedis family had asked to bury him there for fear of his tomb being vandalized, and initially they were turned away. However church officials later changed their minds after the family made a contribution of one billion lire, the equivalent of about 500,000 euros today, according to Italian media reports.

After the exhumation he was not reinterred there.

Mirella Gregori disappeared in 1983

Fast forward to a few days before Halloween, 2018 when this discovery near Villa Borghese was unearthed. There was a preliminary identification that the bones belonged to a woman.

A week after the discovery, police were digging in the property basement when they came upon a skull and a lower jaw.

DNA tests were carried out in November, 2018 for the bones found buried under the pavement of the Apostolic Nunciature of Via Po. The hopes were to match them either to Emanuela or Mirella Gregori, another teenager who disappeared in May 1983. Her case has never been solved either.

The property where the bones were found is an extraterritorial Church property, located in Rome’s city center. The villa was gifted to Pope Pius XII in 1949, by a wealthy entrepreneur called Abramo Giacobbe Isaia Levi (1863-1949) to thank the Vatican for welcoming and protecting Jews under fascist persecution. Gregori lived just a few blocks from this location when she disappeared. An additional lead was that the body might belong to the wife of the custodian of the property, who disappeared in the 1960s.

The bones were too old to be the custodian's wife and the two girls who disappeared in the 1980s.

The Orlandi case has been examined twice from 1983 to 1997, and from 2008 to 2015. The mystery persists with different theories as to what happened to her. They range from a kidnapping as part of a Cold War Soviet plan to blackmail Pope John Paul II, that she was given over for sexual orgies attended by a Vatican-based sect of satanists or that she was taken by the Mafia.

One of the connecting threads in all these theories is pedophilia among high-ranking Catholic priests, in which the mafia laundered Catholic money, but also did the dirty work of stealing children for them.

The Vatican and the CIA have grown together in the manner of a biblical beast – the legs of one, the mouth of the other. All the leaders of American intelligence belonged to the Order of Malta, the second name of which is the “armed arm of the Vatican”: Leon Panetta (since February 13, 2009), George Tenet (1997-2004), Mike Hayden (2006-2009), Robert Gates (1991-93 – director of the CIA, since 2006 – secretary of defense).

Do pedophile cults that kidnap children operate with the permission of government officials?

In February, 1987 the Washington Post printed an article about a sect known as The Finders. They were founded in Washington D.C. in the early 70s by former United States Air Force Master Sergeant Marion Pettie (1920-2003). They were involved in several orphanages around the world, and where they settled, neighbors noticed they always had several children on the premises, who did not attend school and were cared for by different people who lived in their commune. They were led by a "guru" who called himself the Stroller.

In a Glover Park house, in Northeast Washington D.C. where the Finders lived, district police found "an ornate tombstone and round stones gathered near a circle about 70 yards" behind the house. Experts have described where these designs are often used in satanic rituals, however a resident of the commune said they were laid in 1972 as part of a large garden. It's doubtful anyone followed up to see if this was truthful.

Evidence of child abuse, pornography and dark rituals were eventually discovered against the sect, however the CIA quickly closed the case, and the allegations against the group are considered unfounded conspiracy theories.

In 2019, another anonymous tip came to Emanuela's brother Pietro, in which her body could be found in a Teutonic cemetery in the Vatican. The Church cooperated and opened the graves indicated. Like other tips, it led nowhere.

The inference is unmistakable. Is there a world-wide ring run by highly-placed government officials, religious leaders and other unknown powerful people that indulge in pedophilia and dark rituals? Is this what happened to Emanuela Orlandi?