Father Nicola Mapelli, Director of Anima Mundi, the Vatican's ethnological museum, inspects an Inuit kayak with art restorers Catherine Riviere and Martina Brunori in November, 2021.Chris Warde-Jones/The Globe and Mail

Mayo Moran is the Irving and Rosalie Abella Chair in Justice and Equality at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. Her upcoming book is Making Amends for Historic Wrongs: Reparative Justice and the Problem of the Past.

A century after taking Canadian Indigenous belongings to Rome for an exhibit in 1925, the Vatican has decided to return dozens of them from its Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum. The 62-item restitution is the Vatican’s largest to date, and a step toward making amends for the Catholic Church’s outsized role in Canada’s destructive residential schools. But the change of heart also signals a shift in the concept of restitution itself, one with dramatic consequences for museum collections around the world, and with surprising roots in the Holocaust.

In 2022, a Canadian Indigenous delegation went to Rome to ask Pope Francis to apologize for residential schools. When members of the group saw their belongings in the Vatican archives, they asked for them back.

Indigenous artifacts returned by Vatican will arrive in Canada in December

Pope Francis did apologize in 2023 during his visit to Canada, and he also signalled a new openness to restitution, noting that the Seventh Commandment forbids theft and demands the return of stolen items. Now, Pope Leo XIV is ‘gifting’ these items to Canadian bishops on the understanding that they will return them to their communities of origin.

This could mark an important step for the Catholic........

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