Holy See has returned 62 Indigenous artifacts to Canada

The CCCB announced its intention to transfer these artifacts to national Indigenous organizations, which will be responsible for returning them to their communities of origin. The Holy See says that the CCCV is “committed to ensuring that these artefacts are properly safeguarded, respected, and preserved.”

This act of “ecclesial sharing” is described by the Holy See as a “concrete sign of dialogue, respect, and fraternity,” in line with the actions taken by Pope Francis. In March 2022, the Argentine pope received representatives of Canada's Indigenous peoples and asked their forgiveness “on behalf of the Catholic Church” for the wrongs committed by members of the clergy against their peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries.

At issue, in particular, was the role played by the Catholic Church in the management of Indigenous boarding schools. These were set up at the request of the Canadian government to assimilate native populations, often by taking children away from their families.

In July 2022, Francis traveled to Canada on a “penitential pilgrimage,” during which he listened to accounts of the suffering of Indigenous peoples.

The Vatican's statement also places this donation in the context of the 2023 declaration on the “Doctrine of Discovery.” That declaration affirmed that this worldview, which appeared in three 15th-century papal bulls authorizing European nations to divide up the “New World,” “was not Catholic.” However, the papal bulls have not been repealed, as some Indigenous representatives had requested.

The artifacts crossing the Atlantic Ocean are part of the patrimony assembled in 1925 by Pope Pius XI during the Vatican Missionary Exhibition, organized on the occasion of that year's Jubilee. These objects, sent by Catholic missionaries between 1923 and 1925, were intended to “bear witness to the faith and cultural richness of peoples,” according to the statement. They were then incorporated into the Lateran Ethnological Missionary Museum, which in 2020 became the “Anima Mundi” Ethnological Museum.

In March 2022, during the meeting between Francis and Indigenous leaders, some representatives visited the museum and were “moved by the presence of several artifacts belonging to their culture,” including a large wooden canoe. Some then expressed the wish to see them returned, questioning the circumstances under which the Holy See had acquired these objects.

The Vatican has always denied any illegal acquisition and offers assurances, in its statement, that it has provided the Canadian bishops with information to “certify their origins and the circumstances of their transportation to Rome for the 1925 Exhibition.”

This is not the first time that the Holy See has voluntarily parted with museum items. In December 2022, Francis decided to give three fragments of the Parthenon, belonging to the Vatican Museums' collections, to the Archbishop of Athens, Hieronymus II.

At the time, the Holy See again insisted that this was not a restitution, but a gift motivated by a desire to encourage dialogue with the Greek Orthodox Church.

The issue of returning items from museum collections to places of origin is a challenge faced well beyond the Church, with secular, private, and public museums all facing the intricacies of various historical situations and sometimes crimes that have resulted in the current placement of countless items around the globe.