Pope repatriates sixty-two of indigenous artefacts to Canada

2025-11-17 03:20:18

(MENAFN) Pope Leo XIV has returned 62 artifacts from the Vatican Museums that originally belonged to Indigenous communities in Canada, according to reports.

The items were handed over Saturday to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), which announced plans to return them to the respective Indigenous communities.

A joint statement from the Vatican and the CCCB said the pontiff "desires that this gift represent a concrete sign of dialogue, respect and fraternity."

“The sixty-two artefacts, coming from different communities, are part of the patrimony received on the occasion of the Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925, encouraged by Pope Pius XI,” the statement noted.

The artifacts were sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries between 1923 and 1925 and later became part of the Lateran Ethnological Missionary Museum, which eventually merged into the Vatican Museums’ Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum.

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