Pope returns 62 artifacts to Canada's Indigenous peoples as part of reckoning with colonial past

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’s Holy Year. The Vatican insists the items were “gifts” to Pope Pius XI, who wanted to celebrate the church’s global reach, its missionaries and the lives of the Indigenous peoples they evangelized. “This 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,” said the joint statement from the Vatican and Canadian church.