‘An unsettling colonial collection’: should the Vatican return items ‘gifted’ to it from Indigenous peoples?; The Guardian, November 11, 2026

Joanna Moorhead , The Guardian; ‘An unsettling colonial collection’: should the Vatican return items ‘gifted’ to it from Indigenous peoples?

"The origins of this collection lie in an event mounted in 1925, when Pope Pius XI asked Catholic missionaries around the world to send cultural and sacred belongings from the communities they “served” to Rome, for an exhibition that would celebrate the Catholic church’s reach across the planet. It went on for a year, was attended by around a million people, and when it finished many of the objects remained in Rome. The following year, in November 1926, they became the core of a new Vatican Ethnological Museum, then housed at the Lateran Palace. In 1973 it moved across Rome to the Vatican Museums, where it remains to this day.

They’re big on anniversaries at the Vatican – witness the huge service planned next week to celebrate 400 years since the consecration of St Peter’s Basilica – but there’s an eerie silence round the Ethnological Museum, rebranded the Anima Mundi (“soul of the world”) in 2019. A source inside the Vatican told me a decision had been made to lie low over this particular landmark...

Even in 1925 some people questioned the ethics of the exhibition: most notably Anthony Martin Fernando, an Australian Aboriginal who had travelled to Europe to protest at the treatment of his people, and who went to Rome to leaflet visitors to the 1925 ethnological exhibition."