A mystery in the Vatican takes an unexpected turn with the discovery of thousands of unidentified human bones
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff, welcome back to yet another episode of Plain English. Thank you for inviting me into your routine, whether that’s on your commute, while you exercise, doing errands, or studying at home. It’s a pleasure to be a part of your studies. JR is the other name you need to know. He’s the producer. He edits the audio, creates the web page, and makes sure everything gets scheduled on time, so you have your episodes early every Monday and Thursday morning. Speaking of the web page, the URL for this episode is PlainEnglish.com/178 because, well, this is episode 178.
Coming up on today’s program: the thirty-five year old mystery of a missing girl in the Vatican continues to take twists and turns, after a ossuary was found with thousands of bones. Later on, we’ll have a discussion of what it means to be “dogged by” something. And we’ll close with a quote on death by Winston Churchill. All very appropriate to today’s theme.
If you enjoy Plain English, then you might like getting the emails we make for every episode. They have links to English articles about the main topic, so you can do some further reading in English. And we also explain one additional word or phrase from the episode content. All for free, every Monday and Thursday. To get those, please visit PlainEnglish.com/mail.
New twist in search for missing girl
Before we dive into today’s episode content, I want to give you a little background. These are two things I had to look up before I could fully understand the story.
First off, What is the Vatican City really? I think I knew this, but here’s some more information on what it is. The Vatican City is the world’s smallest country: at just 110 acres (44 hectares), it’s an eighth as big as the New York’s Central Park and only about 1,000 people live there. The majority of the land area is comprised of museums and cultural sites, including St. Peter’s Basilica, the Sistene Chapel, and other museums. It may be small, but it is a real country: the head of state is the Pope, and the rest of the government is comprised of Catholic clergy. It’s not a democracy; the Pope cannot be turned out of office. So the Vatican City is its own tiny country, completely surrounded by the city of Rome; very few people live there; and the Church runs everything.
The second thing to tell you is what an ossuary is. I sort of guessed the meaning of the word from its base, but an ossuary is a place to store skeletal remains. Skeletal remains are the bones of deceased animals, in this case humans. We don’t typically use ossuaries in modern times, but they are a way to bury people where space in cemeteries is in short supply. Typically what happens is that a person is buried. The body is left to decompose for a period of years. Once most of the body is decomposed, the bones are collected and stored in an ossuary. That takes up much less space than a whole casket. Sorry to gross you out on a Monday morning, but that’s part of the story.
OK, so now we’re ready to go. Thirty-six years ago, a fifteen year old girl named Emanuela Orlandi disappeared after leaving a music lesson in Rome. She was the daughter of a Vatican City employee. She was never found, but her disappearance has captured media attention and inspired conspiracy theories over the years. In one theory, she was kidnapped by the mafia; in another, her kidnapping was related to a plot to kill Pope John Paul II. Many people believe that her disappearance had something to do with the financial scandals that dogged the Church in the 1980s; her father worked at the Vatican Bank.
However, nobody knows what happened to her, and the trail has been cold for quite some time. Investigators have exhumed remains to investigate her fate before, but she has never been found.
In last 2017, Pietro Orlandi, her brother, was approached by people who told him that his sister might be buried in the Teutonic Cemetery in the Vatican City. He received an anonymous letter saying exactly where his sister was buried. The letter showed a small tomb in the Teutonic Cemetery, where two German princesses was buried. Both died in the mid-1800s.
The Vatican City agreed to exhume the remains and test for DNA; the process was led by a professor of forensic science in Rome, under the supervision of the Vatican City’s chief prosecutor. When they opened the tombs up, they were shocked at what they found: nothing. Nobody was buried there. Not only did they not find the remains of Emanuela Orlandi, but the Vatican now has to explain to the family of the two princesses what happened to their ancestors’ bodies.
That’s still not all. The Vatican wanted to investigate why, exactly, there would have been nothing in the tombs. In its research, it found that the cemetery had undergone renovations in the 1960s and 1970s, so they did a little digging around under the same cemetery. That’s when they found two ossuaries containing skeletal remains, thousands of bones—they had not been aware that the ossuaries were there. Some ossuaries are boxes, but often they are just underground cavities, just a big open space, which was the case here. They were located under a trapdoor in the basement of a church college. So now there is a new mystery: who are these people, and is Emanuela Orlandi among them?
It was impossible to say how many individuals were represented among the bones found, but they packed the bones up in sealed bags and proceeded to do some testing on them. With carbon testing, scientists can approximate the era from which the bones came. Finally last weekend, the news came out: the bones are too old to belong to the missing girl. The mystery endures.
Related: Next stop, ancient history: Rome’s new subway tunnel unearths hidden treasures
Fun fact; or, morbid fact: the biggest ossuary in the world. Do you know where it is? Buried under the streets of Paris. The skeletal remains of six million people are buried underneath Paris. They have underground passageways packed thick with the bones of millions of people. They ran out of cemetery space so they packed the bones tightly in underground ossuaries. How do you sleep at night, if you live in Paris, knowing this is underground?
By the way, what do you think happened? We have listeners in Italy—a lot of them. What do you guys think happened here? I don’t know, but I wonder if people weren’t just playing a cruel trick on the family. They suffered the disappearance of the girl, their relative. From what I’ve read, the Vatican has been less than fully cooperative, to say the least, in the years that have gone by. And now they went through the ups and downs of this whole ordeal.
I sympathize with the families of the two princesses, too. They thought their ancestors were buried in these tombs; they probably visited these tombs and paid respects. Now, they’re in the middle of a huge mystery. These women were buried 183 years ago. I’m just going to go on record as saying, I don’t want my bones to cause anyone any trouble 183 years from now. The people 183 years from now are going to have a lot more important things to do than worry about whether my bones are where they thought they were.
If you’ve got a theory or some thoughts on what happened, leave it in the comments section right underneath this episode. I’m paying attention to the comments now—now that I’ve figured out how to effectively block all the spam. So leave your message, practice your writing a little bit, underneath this episode transcript at PlainEnglish.com/178.
Great stories make learning English fun
