In a message dated 4/22/02 11:33:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< The Franciscans are the most pro-Fascist part of the Catholic church? Not any of the Franciscans that I know. The local St. Francis church has gay members, creates housing for the poor. F >> We really need to look beyond these anecdotes of personal experience in judging the political character of things. Maybe you should ask your Franciscan friends about: Newsweeek, March 30, 1998: "In the early years of World War II, Catholic priests oversaw forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs under the aegis of the Ustasha state; Franciscan friars distributed Ustasha propaganda. Several high Catholic officials in Yugoslavia were later indicted for war crimes. They included Father Dragutin Kamber, who ordered the killing of nearly 300 Orthodox Serbs; Bishop Ivan Saric of Sarajevo, known as the "hangman of the Serbs"; and Bishop Gregory Rozman of Slovenia, a wanted Nazi collaborator. A trial held by the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission in 1946 resulted in the conviction of a half-dozen Ustasha priests, among them former Franciscan Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, a commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp where the Ustashas tortured and slaughtered hundreds of thousands with a brutality that shocked even the Nazis." And from CNS London Bureau Chief 23 November, 1999 "In recent years the Vatican has refused appeals by Jewish groups to open its archives, after newly-unclassified wartime documents claimed the Vatican had taken possession of gold worth more than one hundred million dollars, confiscated from victims of the Ustashe. The new suit was filed in a California court last week by two Ukrainian organizations, the Ukrainian Union of Nazi Victims and Prisoners and the Organization of Antifascist Resistance Fighters, representing more than 300,000 Ukrainian victims of the Nazis and Ustashe. Apart from the Vatican Bank, the suit also names as defendant the Franciscan religious orders, which the applicants claim "conducted illicit financial transactions with the cooperation of defendant banks [after the war] in order to conceal the Ustashe Treasury for the benefit of Ustashe and Nazi war criminals for the purpose of evading capture and trial by war crimes tribunals and to attempt to preserve the Ustashe regime as a government in exile." And this re: a class action suit filed in the US: "Survivors are now suing to recover hundreds of millions of dollars of property looted by the Croatian Nazis, converted to gold, and held by the Vatican Bank for safekeeping. Rumors had circulated about the fantastic wealth that allowed Croatian war criminals to escape justice and live lives of luxury in South America, Spain, and even California until a June 1998 US State Department report confirmed the story. "Serb and Jewish survivors have filed a class action lawsuit in San Francisco Federal Court seeking an accounting from the Vatican Bank and Franciscan Order. While the Vatican Bank has repeatedly denied their involvement, service of the lawsuit on the Franciscan Order took place in Oakland on Tuesday, March 15, appropriately upon a Croatian Franciscan priest, and on the Vatican Bank in Rome at noon on Friday, March 17.[2000]" _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
