Cardinal Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State: " Vatican Takes Care of Its Victims" ….unless They Are Serbs, Jews, and Roma, Vatican Bank Claims, August 15, 2007

Cardinal Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State: " Vatican Takes Care of Its Victims" ….unless They Are Serbs, Jews, and Roma.

Vatican Bank Claims
August 15, 2007

http://www.vaticanbankclaims.com/august15.htm

United States — In a recent news conference, speaking on the issue of sexual abuse by priests, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said:

I hope that other institutions and social agencies will face this same problem with their members, with an equal degree of courage and realism as the Catholic Church has done. I wonder if the other agencies or institutions have also provided financial consideration for victims as the Catholic Church has done; if they have taken care of the victims and those who are guilty. Nashville, August 12, 2007

But for the mainly Christian Serb victims of genocide as well as Jews, and Roma in former Yugoslavia, there is no financial consideration or even an apology by the Vatican…There is only the prospect of death without closure by elderly Holocaust survivors and no answers as to why the Vatican Bank and Franciscan Order assisted their killers to escape justice by laundering the proceeds of genocide after the Second World War.

The Vatican Bank and Franciscan Order stand accused of laundering millions of dollars in war loot – the proceeds of concentration camps run by Croatian Nazis known as the Ustasha. According to deposition testimony by a former US counter intelligence agent in the lawsuit, Alperin v. Vatican Bank (US District Court, Northern California, Case No. C99-4941 MMC) , the Ustasha Treasury was laundered with the tacit support of former Vatican Undersecretary State Montini (later Pope Paul VI).

Since 1999 the Vatican and Franciscan Order have been fighting this lawsuit and waiting for every survivor to die without justice. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have all come to terms with their Holocaust issues however the Vatican however continues to hold out.

Cardinal Bertone investigated the issue of the ratlines and the Catholic Church – the means by which Nazis escaped justice to South America - while Archbishop of Genoa. Cardinal Bertone has a moral obligation to also address the issues of money laundering and genocide if his concern for victims is to be perceived as anything more than crocodile tears.