Posted on 06/16/2005 4:56:23 PM PDT by Jane_N
San Francisco, Jun. 15, 2005 (CNA) - A ruling this week by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld an earlier decision that Holocaust survivors can continue their claims against the Vatican for the restitution of funds plundered from former Yugoslavia during the Second World War.
The majority of the victims of genocide in Croatia during World War II were Orthodox Christian Serbs. More than 500,000 of them were liquidated by the Croatian Ustasha, with the backing of some Catholic clerics. These funds have been referred to as the Ustasha or Croatian treasury.
According to a report by Matt Abbott, the San Francisco court denied a Vatican petition for reconsideration and a request for an extraordinary en banc hearing. It also issued an amended opinion which indicated the Italian Peace Treaty of 1947 did not preclude the lawsuit because the Vatican was not a signatory to the treaty.
In a word. YES.
Well, those tax collectors and hookers were not professing to be Christians and all the while stabbing other Christians in the BACK!
Well, I guess some good did come out of there afterall.
Not much, but a little.
Okay, so nobody inside the Vatican is Christian? Oy vey, the FR Catholics might disagree with you, newbie.
No clergy took part in Jasenovac.
Tudjman fought against the Ustashe as part of the Partisans.
The Croatian flag and Coat of Arms predates the Ustashe.
Also IIRC the priests involved did run an escape route for war criminals that ran through Italy, if not the Vatican directly.
WWII was a sad time for all involved and the recriminations won't be over until generations of affected relatives are gone.
ping
Interesting... IIRC, the 9th Circus Court has repeatedly ruled that there's an inpenetrible wall between church and state.
Now they're claiming that the state can have control over the church - If the claimants win in their suit against the Vatican, just how can the state enforce the ruling without violating that "wall."
More importantly, isn't the Vatican a sovern state? I know Vatican City is...
Mark
You can ask these guys to list these clerics until they are blue in the face but all they do is mention two names: Archbishop Stepinac, who had nothing to do with the Ustashe, and Miroslav Filipovic - who was thrown out of the Franciscan order and laicized years before he became a prison commander for the Ustashe.
But the liars will continue to lie as long as they can breathe.
Spot on.
Think the main guy was Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic. That guy was a nasty character.
How was he "nasty"?
Alouette, I really expect better from you than this uninformed bigotry.
(1) The only massacres of Jews that took place on Catholic soil prior to the 20th century were the Rhineland pogroms.
During those pogroms, the Catholic bishops sided with the Jewish population and denounced the self-styled "Crusaders" who plundered and murdered Jews.
The Church did not despoil massacred Jews.
The Jewish relics and manuscripts found in the Vatican archives and libraries (not the "catacombs" - I don't know where you got that from) come in large part from Catholic converts from Judaism and the Catholic Hebraists of the 15th century like Reuchlin and Ximenes who bought up hundreds of manuscripts and texts for study purposes.
i am not saying that the Church was particularly nice to jews in the Middle Ages - it weighed them down with occupational restrictions, land use restrictions, unfair taxes, forced them to listen to missionizing sermons, confiscated jewish texts suspected of anti-Christian blasphemy, prevented Jewish converts to Christianity from doing teshuvah, etc. - but the Church never endorsed or orchestrated massacres of Jewish citizens.
(2) The attacks on the Huguenots came from the French royal family and the expropriation of the Huguenots went directly to the French crown. The only Huguenot items in the Vatican archives are copies of Huguenot books.
(3) The Cathars (who were virulently anti-Semitic by the way) were again plundered and massacred by the French crown in open warfare between the Cathars' patron - the count of Toulouse - and the King of France. No documents or relics of them really exist in the Vatican archives or elsewhere - anything that was taken from them went to the French victors.
(4) The Templars, again, were victims of the King of France who confiscated their land and their money. By right all of their property belonged to the Vatican anyway, since they were a Catholic religious order - yet France took almost all of it.
(5) You're not going to find much treasure taken from "heretics" other than copies of books by heretics kept on file, and you'll find nothing belonging to witches either - probably because almost every single heretic or witch executed in the Middle Ages was executed by the local secular authority.
However, one can find all over Europe thousands of Catholic churches and Catholic artistic treasures stolen or reduced to rubble by various Protestant sects and now in the possession of those sects or of secular governments.
The Church is hardly, as you say, "pure as the wind-drifted snow" - but there is no need to make up false charges.
I would think that you would be on the side of Margaret Clitheroe on this one.
OK, so where is the "nasty" part?
Because of THE RATLINES, that's why. U.S. has aided and abetted VATICAN in helping NAZI Criminals escape justice.
he was most likely dismissed from US Army informant status because the US correctly suspected he was a double agent.
There is a lot more to the Draganovic story than meets the eye or what you have told here.
This is all new stuff to me. I never heard of this before.
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