Tuesday, January 17, 2006
FRANCISCANS IN COURT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court allowed Holocaust survivors on Tuesday to proceed with a lawsuit claiming that the Vatican Bank and a Franciscan religious order profited from property stolen by Croatia's pro-Nazi World War Two government.
The justices declined to review a ruling by a U.S. appeals court that reinstated the suit, which claimed the Order of Friars Minor conspired with the Vatican Bank to facilitate the transfer of gold and other looted valuable assets.
The Holocaust survivors filed the lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco in 1999 accusing the defendants of receiving property stolen from victims of Croatia's brutal Ustasha regime from 1941 to 1945. As many as 700,000 people, mostly Serbs, were killed at death camps run by the regime.
The lawsuit claimed that the stolen property was used after the war to help Nazi war criminals escape from Europe to South America. The class-action lawsuit seeks compensation for the monetary losses suffered by Holocaust survivors.
E. Michael Jones begins his book on Medjugorje with the activities of the Ustasha in the area during WW II. There is a whole lot we haven't been told about this area of the world, IMHO.
