# Vatican museum’s Indigenous collection faces renewed calls for returns

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/an-unsettling-colonial-collection-should-the-vatican-return-items-gifted-to-it-from-indigenous-peoples/
- Published: 2026-11-11T12:17:13+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-11T12:47:20+00:00
- Original publisher: The Guardian (publisher lean: Left)
- Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/nov/11/vatican-anima-mundi-ethnological-rome-colonial
- Topics: Art, Culture

## Key points

- The Vatican holds about 80,000 objects gathered from Indigenous communities.
- Many entered the collection after a 1925 missionary-led exhibition.
- An art historian questions whether they were freely given.

## Summary

The Vatican’s Anima Mundi museum holds around 80,000 objects from Indigenous communities worldwide, many collected by Catholic missionaries and brought to Rome for a 1925 exhibition celebrating the Church’s global reach. The collection is receiving little attention as the Vatican prepares to mark 400 years since St Peter’s Basilica was consecrated, amid questions about whether the objects were freely given.

The exhibition drew about a million visitors, and many objects stayed in Rome, forming the core of a museum established in 1926. Art historian Gloria Bell describes the collection as colonial and says she has seen evidence that missionaries looted graves in Canada; she argues the objects are cultural belongings connected to ancestors, not simply artefacts. The Vatican declined to be interviewed for the article.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.