Aboard the papal plane
Reuters
The Vatican is involved in a peace mission to try to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Pope Francis said on Sunday, declining to give further details.
“I am willing to do everything that has to be done. There is a mission in course now but it is not yet public. When it is public, I will reveal it,” the Pope told reporters during a flight home after a three-day visit to Hungary.
“I think that peace is always made by opening channels. You can never achieve peace through closure…This is not easy.”
Pope Francis holds a news conference as he returns to the Vatican following his apostolic journey to Hungary, aboard the plane, on 30th April, 2023. PICTURE: Vincenzo Pinto/Pool via Reuters
The Pope added that he had spoken about the situation in Ukraine with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and with Metropolitan Hilarion, a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in Budapest.
“In these meetings we did not just talk about Little Red Riding Hood. We spoke of all these things. Everyone is interested in the road to peace,” he said.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, Francis has pleaded for peace practically on a weekly basis, and has repeatedly expressed a wish to act as a broker between Kyiv and Moscow. His offer has so far failed to produce any breakthrough.
Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal met the Pope at the Vatican on Thursday and said he had discussed a “peace formula” put forward by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. He said he had also invited the pontiff to visit Kyiv.
Pope Francis, 86, has said previously that he wants to visit Kyiv but also Moscow on a peace mission.
Tens of thousands have been killed, millions uprooted and whole cities have been flattened during the war in Ukraine.
Francis, who appeared in relatively good condition during the trip, also spoke of his health following his hospitalisation in late March for what the Vatican said at the time was bronchitis.
He said he felt a strong pain at the end of his general audience on Wednesday, 29th March and tried to sleep.
“I did not lose consciousness but I had a high fever and at 3pm the doctor took me to the hospital right away,” he said.
“It was a strong and acute pneumonia in the lower section of the lung. Thank God I can talk about it. The body responded well to the treatment, thank God,” he said. He was released on 1st April.
A part of one of his lungs was removed when he was a young man in Argentina more than half a century ago.
The Pope said there were no changes to plans to go to Lisbon in August for an international youth gathering and then separately to Marseilles and Mongolia.
Pope Francis holds a news conference as he returns to the Vatican following his apostolic journey to Hungary, aboard the plane, on 30th April, 2023. PICTURE: Vatican Media/Handout via Reuters
Meanwhile, AP reports that the Pope also said that talks were underway to return colonial-era artifacts in the Vatican Museum that were acquired from Indigenous peoples in Canada and voiced a willingness to return other problematic objects in the Vatican’s collection on a case-by-case basis.
“The Seventh Commandment comes to mind: If you steal something you have to give it back,” Francis said during an airborne press conference en route home from Hungary.
Recently, Francis returned to Greece the three fragments of the Parthenon sculptures that had been in the Vatican Museums’ collection for two centuries. The Pope said Sunday that the restitution was “the right gesture” and that when such returns were possible, museums should undertake them.
“In the case where you can return things, where it’s necessary to make a gesture, better to do it,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t, if there are no possibilities – political, real or concrete possibilities. But in the cases where you can restitute, please do it. It’s good for everyone, so you don’t get used to putting your hands in someone else’s pockets.”
His comments to The Associated Press were his first on a question that has forced many museums in Europe and North America to rethink their ethnographic and anthropological collections. The restitution debate has gathered steam amid a reckoning for the colonial conquests of Africa, the Americas and Asia and demands for restitution of war loot by the countries and communities of origin.
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The Vatican has an extensive collection of artifacts and art made by Indigenous peoples from around the world, much of it sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 exhibition in the Vatican gardens.
The Vatican insists the artifacts, including ceremonial masks, wampum belts and feathered headdresses, were gifts. But Indigenous scholars dispute whether Native peoples at the time could have freely offered their handicrafts given the power differentials at play in colonial periods.
Francis, the first-ever Latin American Pope, knows the history well. Last year, he travelled to Canada to personally apologise to Indigenous peoples for abuses they endured at the hands of Catholic missionaries at residential schools.
In the run-up to the visit, Indigenous groups visited the Vatican’s Anima Mundi museum, saw some of their ancestors’ handiwork, and expressed interest in having greater access to the collection, and the return of some items.
“The restitution of the Indigenous things is underway with Canada – at least we agreed to do it,” Francis said, adding that the Holy See’s experience meeting with the Indigenous groups in Canada had been “very fruitful.”
Pope Francis meets the journalists during a press conference aboard the airplane directed to Rome, at the end of his pastoral visit to Hungary, on Sunday, 30th April, 2023. PICTURE: Vincenzo Pinto/Pool Photo Via AP.
Indeed, just a few weeks ago in another follow-up to the Canada apology, the Vatican formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery”. This theory, backed by 15th-century papal bulls, was used to legitimise the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and forms the basis of some property laws today in the US and Canada.
Francis recalled that looting was a common feature during colonial-era wars and occupations. “They took these decisions to take the good things from the other,” he said.
He said going forward, museums “have to make a discernment in each case,” but that where possible, restitution of objects should be made.
“And if tomorrow the Egyptians come and ask for the obelisk, what will we do?” he said chuckling, referring to the great obelisk that stands at the centre of St Peter’s Square. The Roman Emperor Caligula brought the ancient obelisk to Rome more than 2,000 years ago, and it was moved to the square in the 16th century.
The Vatican Museums are mentioned in the 2020 book The Brutish Museums, which recounts the sacking of the Royal Court of Benin City by British forces in 1897 and the subsequent dispersal in museums and collections around the globe of its famed Benin Bronzes.
In the appendix, the Vatican is listed as one of the museums, galleries or collections that “may” have objects looted from Benin City, in today’s Nigeria, in 1897.
The Vatican Museums hasn’t responded to requests for information. The Nigerian Embassy to the Holy See, asked recently about the claim, said its “contact in the Vatican is currently looking into the issue.”
– With NICOLE WINFIELD/AP
