Prague, July 26 (CTK) – The Sovereign Military Order of Malta has spent almost ten million crowns on legal aid connected with Czech church property restitution in the past five years, its Czech Grand Priory head Johannes Lobkowicz has said in an interview with CTK.
Admitting that a number of the Order’s bids for property return have ended in court, he said welcomed this as the judicial system is a guarantee of democracy and the rule of law.
Nevertheless, Lobkowicz said legal disputes are actually unnecessary in a situation where the Catholic Malta Order is seeking prosperity of the society.
“It is sad that we have to fight for the rule of law this way. Fortunately, [the Czech Republic is] a law-abiding state and the system of courts functions perfectly, we have no big problems with it,” he said.
He is of the view that the politicians who deal with the restitution now are approaching the Malta Order and other religious orders as scapegoats to an extent.
“There are six Orders in the Czech Republic – the Teutonic Order, the Malta Order, the Benedictines in Broumov, the Cistercians in Osek and Vyssi Brod, and the Premonstratensians in Tepla. In the case of all of them, the politicians tried to find reasons for averting the property return…However, they [politicians] have failed, the courts upheld our position,” Lobkowicz said.
In the case of the Malta Order, the state challenged the return of certain plots, arguing that they might have been originally confiscated based on the Benes Decrees, or post-WWII presidential decrees confiscating the property and abolishing Czechoslovak citizenship of ethnic Germans and Hungarians.
Lobkowicz said he believes that the court will refute the Benes Decrees argument in the ongoing court dispute.
“As early as 1946, we proved that we did not lose our property based on the Benes Decrees. It was the other way round, the Germans confiscated our property in wartime and subsequently sold it to the [Nazi-controlled] Protectorate and Bohemia and Moravia and the German Reich. It was returned to us based on a court verdict in 1947,” Lobkowicz said.
Other court disputes are underway over cases where it is necessary to prove that the property in question really belongs to the state, since the church restitution law, which the then centre-right cabinet pushed through as of 2013, does not enable to return other than state property to churches. However, the state transferred some plots to towns in the past.
The Malta Order applied for the return of a total of 1,650 hectares of fields and forests, and has received 1,400 already.
Further plots and buildings that are subject to dispute are in Brezineves on Prague’s outskirts. If it gained them definitively, the Malta Order would like to use them within its social service project, a network of personal assistants and volunteers who help elderly and disabled people in their homes, and also help homeless people regain personal documents and seek contact doctors.
Lobkowicz said he would like to introduce mobile units with a doctor and a nurse, after Norway’s example, to help the homeless in the streets.
“However, a mere car without the crew costs one million crowns. We plan to finance this for one year and then share the costs with the state, as has also been the case with our other projects, since we do something that is up to the state to do,” he said, adding that the Order’s mission is to help civil society.
