Vatican Bank

The Vatican Bank is a common name given to the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR) or Institute for Religious Works, the central bank for the Roman Catholic Church located in Vatican City.

Several thoroughly documented books that appeared during the 1990s were highly critical of the Vatican Bank's historical relations with Nazi governments in Germany and especially in the collaborationist regime of Croatia. They engendered initial defensive hostility and controversy. The controversy centers on conclusions drawn from the documentation rather than the documents themselves. According to a 1998 report issued by the US State Department, the Nazi Croatian treasury was illicitly transferred to the Vatican Bank and other banks after the end of World War II. For its part, the Vatican has repeatedly denied any Fransiscan participation in Ustash crimes or the disappearance of the Croatian Treasury, yet has refused to open its wartime records to substantiate its denial.

The declassification in 1997 of a 1946 memo from US Treasury agent Emerson Bigelow, quoting a "reliable source in Italy," who alerted his superior that Croatian officials had sent 350 million confiscated Swiss francs to the Vatican Bank "for safekeeping." On the way some 150 million were apparently seized by British authorities at the border between Austria and Switzerland, which brought the secret transfer into the open. "There is no basis in reality to the report," said Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, as reported in Time (see link).

A class action suit against the Vatican Bank was was filed in United States Federal Court in San Francisco in November 1999. The plaintiffs are concentration camp survivors of Serb, Jewish, and Ukrainian background and their relatives as well as organizations representing over 300,000 Holocaust victims. John Loftus, author of Unholy Trinity serves as an expert witness in this case.

External links

(Caution:the following accounts are all critical of the Vatican Bank.)

• The Vatican Bank claims (http://www.vaticanbankclaims.com/home.html)
• "The Vatican, Croatia and the Nazi Gold" (http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/the_vatican.htm)
• Time Magazine "The Vatican Pipeline: U.S. intelligence document links $170 million in Nazi gold to the Vatican" (http://www.time.com/time/search/article/0,8599,8505,00.html) July 22, 1997 report on declassified memo

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia article. Browse Wikipedia for more information.