- Pope Francis said Sunday that recent insinuations the late-Pope St. John Paul II’s pursued underage girls to molest are “offensive and baseless.”
- Francis made the remarks before tourists and pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square.
- The Pope spoke after an audiotape recently surfaced in which a purported Roman mobster insinuates John Paul would go out looking for underage girls to molest.
- Days before Francis spoke, the Vatican’s media apparatus described the tape as “slanderous.”
- The tape was played on an Italian TV program by Pietro Orlandi, brother of Emanuela Orlandi, the teenage daughter of a Vatican employee who lived at the Vatican.
- The disappearance of the 15-year-old in 1983 is an enduring mystery that has spawned countless theories and so far fruitless investigations in the decades since.
