Pope Francis has ordered the return of three Parthenon fragments which have been held in the papal collections of the Vatican Museums for centuries to Greece.
The Vatican has announced that Pope Francis will give the 2,500-year-old fragments to His Beatitude Ieronymos II, the Orthodox archbishop of Athens and All Greece, as a gesture of ecumenical dialogue.
The Pope said the gesture was “as a concrete sign of a sincere desire to continue on the ecumenical journey of witness to the truth.”
The Parthenon, which is on the Acropolis in Athens, was completed in the fifth century BC as a temple to the goddess Athena and its decorative friezes contain some of the greatest examples of ancient Greek sculpture.
According to the Vatican Museums website, one piece is the head of the horse that was pulling Athena's chariot on the west side of the building. The others are from the head of a boy and the head of a bearded male.
Pope Francis last met Ieronymos II during his apostolic trip to Greece in December 2021 when he apologised for past actions and decisions by the Catholic Church “that had little or nothing to do with Jesus and the Gospel, but were instead marked by a thirst for advantage and power [and] gravely weakened our communion.”
“History makes its weight felt, and here, today, I feel the need to ask anew for the forgiveness of God and of our brothers and sisters for the mistakes committed by many Catholics.”
The return of the fragments by the Vatican will take place as Britain and Greece continue negotiations over the permanent return of the 2,500-year-old Elgin marbles which are in the British Museum in London.
While Greece has repeatedly called for the permanent return of the sculptures, which British diplomat Lord Elgin removed from the Parthenon temple in the early 19th century when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Greece's then-ruler, the British Museum has always ruled this out.
Earlier this month, however, a Greek newspaper reported that a deal to return the marbles to Greece was close, but the Greek government said it was not imminent.
UK Culture secretary Michelle Donelan said last week that returning the 'Elgin Marbles’ to Greece would be a 'very dangerous and slippy road’, adding: ‘I think the current status quo is working and we should protect it.’
This isn’t the first time that Pope Francis has made an ecumenical gesture with a centuries-old gift. In 2019, the pope <a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/42253/pope-francis-explains-decision-to-give-relics-of-st-peter-to-orthodox" class=""><strong>gave Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I a relic of St. Peter</strong></a> as “a confirmation of the journey that our Churches have made in drawing closer to one another.”
