The Holy See has moved to defend the late Vatican banker, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, over "baseless and defamatory" allegations that he ordered hit men to murder an Italian teenager in 1983. The Washington Post reports Archbishop Marcinkus, an American who died in Arizona in 2006 at the age of 84, was accused by the girlfriend of a slain mobster of hiring hitmen to kidnap and kill Emanuela Orlandi in 1983, the Italian media and some foreign newspapers said.
"Defamatory, baseless accusations were published regarding (Archbishop) Marcinkus, who has been dead for some time and is unable to defend himself," the Vatican said in a statement chiding the media for publishing the accusations "without any checks."
The unsolved disappearance of Orlandi, daughter of a Vatican employee, is regularly the subject of wild conjecture here and reproductions of the original black and white "Missing" poster are now displayed all over Rome to mark the 25th anniversary.
It is not the first time Orlandi's disappearance has been linked to the Vatican. Investigators even probed at one point if there was a link to the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul in 1981 by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.
Anonymous callers said after she went missing in 1983 that she would be freed if Italy released Agca. But police were never able to confirm any connection between the two cases.
There has also long been speculation of a link between the Orlandi case and alleged mafia involvement in Vatican finances.
Such theories connect Orlandi's disappearance and the still unsolved death in 1982 of Italian Roberto Calvi, known as "God's Banker," who was found hanged from Blackfriars Bridge in London after the institution he ran, Banco Ambrosiano, collapsed.
One judge who oversaw cases related to the Magliana gang and Calvi said that, while it was possible the mob kidnapped Orlandi in the hope of securing a ransom to recover money they had lost in Banco Ambrosiano, accusing Marcinkus was "pure fantasy."
The Vatican expressed its "deep sorrow and condemnation for the spread of information more due to the draw of sensationalism than the demands of seriousness and professional ethics."
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