VATICAN CITY: The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada as part of the Catholic Church\u2019s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas.<\/p>\n
Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts and supporting documentation to a delegation of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during an audience. According to a joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church, the pieces were a gift and a \u201cconcrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The items are part of the Vatican Museum\u2019s ethnographic collection, known as the Anima Mundi museum. The collection has been a source of controversy for the Vatican amid the broader museum debate over the restitution of cultural goods taken from Indigenous peoples during colonial periods.<\/p>\n
Most of the items in the Vatican collection were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens that was a highlight of that year\u2019s Holy Year.<\/p>\n
The Vatican insists the items were \u201cgifts\u201d to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the church\u2019s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized.<\/p>\n
But historians, Indigenous groups and experts have long questioned whether the items could really have been offered freely, given the power imbalances at play in Catholic missions at the time. In those years, Catholic religious orders were helping to enforce the Canadian government\u2019s forced assimilation policy of eliminating Indigenous traditions, which Canada\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called \u201ccultural genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of that policy included confiscating items used in Indigenous spiritual and traditional rituals, such as the 1885 potlatch ban that prohibited the integral First Nations ceremony. Those confiscated items ended up in museums in Canada, the US and Europe, as well as private collections.<\/p>\n
Negotiations on returning the Vatican items accelerated after Pope Francis in 2022 met with Indigenous leaders who had traveled to the Vatican to receive his apology for the church\u2019s role in running Canada\u2019s disastrous residential schools. During their visit, they were shown some objects in the collection, including an Inuit kayak, wampum belts, war clubs and masks, and asked for them to be returned.<\/p>\n
Francis later said he was in favor of returning the items and others in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis, saying: \u201cIn the case where you can return things, where it\u2019s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Vatican said Saturday the items were given back during the Holy Year, exactly 100 years after the 1925 exhibition where they were first exhibited in Rome.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an act of ecclesial sharing, with which the Successor of Peter entrusts to the Church in Canada these artifacts, which bear witness to the history of the encounter between faith and the cultures of the Indigenous peoples,\u201d said the joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church.<\/p>\n
It added that the Canadian Catholic hierarchy committed to ensuring that the artifacts are \u201cproperly safeguarded, respected and preserved.\u201d Officials had previously said the Canadian bishops would receive the artifacts with the explicit understanding that the ultimate keepers will be the Indigenous communities themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VATICAN CITY: The Vatican on Saturday returned 62 artifacts to Indigenous peoples from Canada as part of the Catholic Church\u2019s reckoning with its role in helping suppress Indigenous culture in the Americas. Pope Leo XIV gave the artifacts and supporting documentation to a delegation of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during an audience. According […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514681,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-514680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n