VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Religion News Service - Missouri School of Journalism [Columbia MO]
April 9, 2025
By Claire Giangrave
Her critics have dubbed her ‘the Sea-Witch,’ but her clients say Lauro Sgrò is the only person who gave them a chance.
Laura Sgrò’s home office in Rome’s elegant Barberini neighborhood is stacked with files and books and decorated with vases from her native Sicily. “This is the wolves’ den,” she said, indicating a large painting hanging behind the desk of a pack of wolves in a snowstorm.
“The wolf is my favorite animal,” said Sgrò, “because it’s organized and has a pack mentality, a sense of responsibility, rules, and it knows how to be fierce but can also takes care of others.”
It’s an apt descripton of Sgrò herself, a canon, or church jurisprudence, lawyer, who has become known at the Vatican for taking on some of the most controversial and complex legal cases and scandals facing the Catholic hierarchy. She is representing the family of Emanuela Orlandi, a teenager who disappeared in 1983 in mysterious circumstances, as well as five women who have accused the artist and ex-Jesuit priest Marko Rupnik of sexual or psychological abuse.
Her fellow canon lawyers refused to talk on the record about Sgrò, answering a request for comment with a brusque, “Non si fa” — “It’s not done.” But a few praised her talent anonymously, while criticizing Sgrò for being “too loud.” Her critics at the Vatican have dubbed her “la Strega del Mar” — the Sea-Witch — for her way of pinching the church in her tentacles.
But her clients say Sgrò is the only person who listened to them, supporting their cases when no one else gave them a chance. Her staff consists solely of female lawyers and most of her cases revolve around women, whether it’s a mother seeking the truth about her deceased son, a decades-long case of a missing girl or religious sisters denouncing a culture of abuse at the Vatican. “I am and I feel like a woman,” she told RNS. “My femininity is particularly pronounced.”
In the male-dominated world of the Vatican, she admits she has met with resistance. “There was a certain distrust, because I was something other: I am a woman, I am a layperson, and I don’t work for them,” she said.
Sgrò’s “otherness” also comes in the form of colorful dresses and short skirts, attire that has earned her disapproval at the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, the Holy See’s highest appellate court. In a world of gray suits that values discretion, she is also criticized for her boisterousness and her ability to bring her cases to the media’s attention, evident in her recognition among the “100 legal excellencies” and Forbes magazine’s “100 successful women in Italy,” a copy of which is on display in her office.
Asked about the perceptions of her, Sgrò replied: “I am obstinate about justice. The fact that most important human rights are trampled in that small state governed by the pope is the greatest contradiction I can imagine.”
Sgrò was born March 9, 1975, in Milazzo, on Sicily’s northern tip, where the Mafia’s power weighed heavily on daily life. Like many others, Sgrò was deeply affected by the murders of the anti-Mafia judges Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone in 1992, but she credits her father, Antonino Sgrò, for instilling her sense of justice. “He was the light in my life,” she said, fiddling with a gold cross she wears that once belonged to him.
The son of a once wealthy landowning family, her father had sought his own fortune in Latin America, especially in Brazil, which provided him an escape from Sicily’s provincial mindset and its endemic corruption. “He couldn’t stand the crooked things,” Sgrò said.
Supported by her father to study, Sgrò pursued a fascination with crime by taking a degree in penal comparative law at the University of Messina. She wrote her thesis on the disappearance of Sarah Payne, an 8-year-old British girl whose abduction and murder led to the creation of the U.K.’s sex offender registry. Sgrò was drawn to canon law after a chance introduction to the Vatican’s elite canon law bar. After beginning her studies at the Pontifical Lateran University, she earned her doctorate at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.
She started practicing in Rome in 2010, and the next year opened an office, since closed, in Beirut, where profit can be made from handling marriage annulments. She later opened a third office in Buenos Aires with a partner, Roberto Mauro, capitalizing, some theorize, on interest in the newly elected Argentine, Pope Francis. But she made her name in Rome, where she helped arbitrate the 2013 messy divorce between the Italian starlet Valeria Marini and entrepreneur Giovanni Cottone. Sgrò managed to get the marriage annulled in only five months, catapulting her into influential Roman circles.
Two years later, she represented Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui, a figure at the heart of a scandal involving leaked Vatican financial records known as Vatileaks II. A member of a commission charged with cleaning up Vatican finances, Chaouqui was accused of passing sensitive information over to Italian journalists. Her trial was a media sensation and a “watershed moment in my life,” Sgrò said.
She spoke in her signature uncensored style to reporters. “Only folly and inexperience can lead one to do the things I did,” she recalled. The experience taught her to see the Vatican, she said, as “a world of matryoshkas,” where the truth always seems to have another layer but is also the most useful weapon. The newspapers called Sgrò and her clients witches and traitors. If the insults stuck, she said, so did the enmity she earned at the time.
But her vociferous defense of Chaouqui attracted other high-profile clients.
In June 1983, Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a member of the papal household, disappeared while returning from a music lesson in Rome. Her disappearance, coming after an assassination attempt against the staunchly anti-communist Pope John Paul II by a Turkish hit man, inspired rumors of intrigue and political maneuvering. Mafia involvement was rumored. The case became what Italians refer to as a “Giallo” — a perennial mystery in which every lead sprouts 10 more.
In 2017, Pietro Orlandi, the missing girl’s brother, approached Sgrò. He had been intrigued by how she handled the Vatileaks trial, he said in a recent phone interview.
Sgrò said she had debated whether to take the case. She remembered the media reports of Orlandi’s disappearance, the pictures of the smiling girl in a bandanna that were ubiquitous at the time. On the other hand, she said, “I thought I had already made a sufficient number of enemies,” and it was unclear what she was seeking in taking a decades-old disappearance case.
Her husband and her father, however, encouraged her to accept the case, and Sgrò said she was motivated by her sympathy for Orlandi’s 95-year-old mother, Maria Pezzano. “I would like it if her mother could bring her a flower before she dies,” the lawyer said.
After taking the case, Sgrò filed a missing person report at the Vatican for the first time, requested the creation of an Italian parliamentary committee and a Roman counterpart to study the case. Sgrò was prominently featured in the final episode of a Netflix miniseries, “Vatican Girl,” in 2022. A year later, Francis asked Vatican prosecutors to open an investigation.
Sgrò believes that the media-driven shakeup was necessary. “Nobody cared about the case inside the Vatican,” she said, adding that her aggressive pursuit of the case has brought her death threats.
Yet despite tombs being opened and files being resurrected from archives — one of Sgrò’s coups was forcing the Vatican to admit it kept a file on the girl’s case — they haven’t yielded a trace of the missing girl. Nor has the Vatican welcomed Sgrò as a collaborator.
She and Pietro Orlandi speak every day, he said. The image of the wolves in Sgrò’s office was painted by Pietro’s daughter Elettra. The Orlandi family refers to itself as a pack and each member has chosen which wolf represents them. Sgrò is a member of the pack now, Orlandi told me. “She is a very stubborn woman. Many take a step back when confronted with the Vatican institution, but she never takes a step back.”
In the painting, however, Sgrò said she was represented by a butterfly resting near a Japanese sword. The sword, she said, symbolizes Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher and general who wrote “The Art of War,” which Sgrò calls one of her favorite books. “If you are tidy and have a plan,” she said, “you have good chances of winning.”
Tidiness has not always prevailed. Tensions were stoked with the Vatican in 2023 after Orlandi told an Italian TV news interviewer that now-St. John Paul II was known to leave the Vatican in secret. “He certainly didn’t go blessing houses,” he said, which many viewers interpreted as an accusation that the former pope was a pedophile and had a role in Orlandi’s disappearance.
Shortly after, Francis weighed in after his Sunday Angelus prayer to condemn the “offensive and unfounded inferences.” Sgrò said that her client’s words were taken out of context. According to the Vatican, she refused to say where the information behind Orlandi’s statement came from, but Sgrò denies this account, saying church officials ended their questioning after she claimed a conflict of interest.
“After the death of my father, those were the most painful days of my life,” Sgrò said.
Several Vatican observers and canon lawyers point to the incident as an example of Sgrò’s lack of scruples and say it illustrates the danger of using the media as leverage. But it only solidified Sgrò’s commitment. “The shields went up so quickly and violently, resorting to popular faith and sentiment, that it led me to believe that they were wrong and they had something to protect,” she said. The first chapter of her 2024 book, “Looking for Emanuela: Hidden Truths and New Investigations on the Vatican’s Role in the Orlandi Case,” is dedicated to clarifying the accusations surrounding John Paul II.
The episode didn’t stop her from taking on other high-profile cases, including that of Muguette Baudat, the mother of the Swiss Guard who was found dead in 1998 after allegedly shooting and killing the commander of the Swiss Guards and his wife, about which Sgrò has also written a book, “Blood in the Vatican.” She also represents Domenico Fabiani and Silvia Carlucci, the couple who married despite a law prohibiting employees of the Vatican bank from getting married.
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Sgrò recently agreed to represent five women who accused Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian artist and former Jesuit priest whose Vatican trial on charges of sexual and psychological abuse was recently announced. One of the women, Gloria Branciani, reported that Rupnik had abused her when she was a member of the religious community he founded in 1993 but that she was ignored until other allegations began to emerge in 2020. “For them, being believed is more important than having justice,” said Sgrò, who has also written a book about the case, “Sacred Rapes,” written in her usual bombastic style.
Sgrò, who encouraged the alleged victims to come forward, wrote to hundreds of bishops asking them to take down more than 200 mosaics by Rupnik installed in holy sites around the world, which she alleges were often made as the women were harassed or abused. So far, the Shrine in Lourdes and the John Paul II shrine in Washington, D.C., have complied. The Jesuit order dismissed Rupnik and wrote a letter on March 25 to 20 of his alleged victims offering a “process of healing.”
Sgrò said that Rupnik’s alleged victims were alone when they walked into her office but that she turned them into a pack. “Organized and structured groups can get somewhere,” she said.
Walking out of her office, Sgrò said she dreams of leaving the Vatican behind one day to live on one of the exclusive islands on the Costa Verde, near Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps, she said, she will write novels. At the door, she encountered two of Rupnik’s accusers, Branciani and Mirjam Kovac, who had an appointment. A movie crew filming a documentary had already set up shop in the other room.
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