The Seventh Commandment comes to mind—if you steal something, you have to return it, the Pope said.
On Sunday, Pope Francis said that negotiations to return colonial-era artifacts that the Vatican Museum purchased from Canadian indigenous peoples were in progress. He also expressed a willingness to return other problematic artifacts in the Vatican collection on a case-by-case basis.
Francis said, “The Seventh Commandment comes to mind – if you steal something, you have to give it back,” at a press conference held in the air while traveling from Hungary to the United States.
The three pieces of the Parthenon sculptures, which had spent two centuries in the Vatican Museums collection, were recently returned to Greece by Pope Francis.
The pope said on Sunday that the restitution was “the right gesture” and that when such returns were possible, museums should undertake them.
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
Pope Francis
“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.
