Pope Leo XIV handed over 62 artifacts to the Canadian delegation to be returned to the indigenous communities.

Pope Leo XIV recently handed over the items of the Canadian delegation, led by Bishop Pierre Goudreault, the president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops announced that the artifacts will be transferred as soon as possible to the National Indigenous Organizations, which will return them to the communities of origin. These items were sent to Rome in 1925 by Catholic missionaries for an exhibition organized by Pope Pius XI, and nearly half of them became part of the Missionary Ethnological Museum, later transferred to the collections of the Vatican Museums in the 1970s. In 2022, Pope Francis apologized to the Indigenous peoples of Canada for the abuses in residential schools, acknowledging the Church's role in these tragic events. The repatriation of Indigenous artifacts is part of the ongoing dialogue between the Church and the leaders of Indigenous communities.