From the Netflix documentary series
By Courtney Mares, Catholic News Agency
Jul 15 2023
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said Wednesday night that the Vatican prosecutor’s office is “actively cooperating with the competent Italian authorities” and had handed over the available documentation in the reopened investigation into Orlandi’s case.
Among the documentation delivered to prosecutors in Rome were letters exchanged just months after Orlandi’s disappearance in 1983 between then-Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Agostino Casaroli and a Colombian priest who served as the spiritual adviser and confessor of the Orlandi family, according to the Italian television channel La7.
Casaroli asked the priest to confirm if Orlandi’s older sister Natalina had been sexually harassed by her uncle, Mario Meneguzzi, prior to Orlandi’s disappearance. The priest replied that Natalina confided in him that she was terrified and had been told to keep quiet or she would lose her job at the cafe run by her uncle.
At a press conference in Rome earlier this week, Natalina confirmed that her uncle had made unwanted verbal advances when they worked together in 1978 but said that this stopped quickly once she made it clear that she was not interested.
“I had only spoken about it with the confessor,” she said, noting that she had also told her boyfriend at the time.
In the Vatican statement published the day after the press conference, Bruni clarified that the confessional seal had not been broken in the Orlandi investigation.
Read full text in LiCAS.news.
