The Vatican Missionary Exhibition (1925): The legacies of world cultures on display

During the Jubilee year of 1925, under Pope Pius XI, the first Vatican Missionary Exhibition was inaugurated. Following the success of international exhibitions and fairs held in European and American metropolises, the Catholic Church had decided to “put on display” its evangelising work in missions scattered all over the world – from Alaska to Ethiopia, from China to the Amazon, from India to Peru. A hundred thousand artefacts collected by the missionaries around the world were exhibited to testify to the diversity of cultures and indigenous knowledge that had produced them. The Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925 was such a success that, after its conclusion, part of the collections on display became the original nucleus of the Missionary Ethnological Museum that was opened in the Lateran Palace. This museum remained open for decades until its closure between 1963 and 1973, when the collections were transferred to a newly built area of the Vatican Museums, where they remain today. Since then, the Ethnological Museum has undergone several renovations and was inaugurated by Pope Francis in 2019 under the name of “Anima Mundi”.

The Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925 was an event of extraordinary relevance not only for the Catholic Church and the missionary orders, but also for the history of culture and science, the ideological and material legacy of which still reverberates today. Due to the specific way in which the Vatican collection was assembled and the various actors operating on a global scale who were involved in the process, the Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925 represents an exceptional case study to explore the multiple entanglements among power dynamics, collecting, and knowledge production.

Following the fruitful workshop held at the KNIR on 5th June 2025, this special issue brings together scholars from different disciplines to reflect on what made the Vatican Missionary Exhibition of 1925 possible – from the anthropological visions that inspired the collections, to the museum practices implemented for the exhibition, from the richness of indigenous knowledge conveyed by the artefacts to their transmedia dissemination in order to create the “narrative” of the exhibition. Finally, the special issue also aims to reflect on the legacy of the Vatican Missionary Exhibition, which is embodied in the materiality of the objects that have come down to us.

Key words: #Vatican Missionary Exhibition, #Missionary Ethnological Museum, #Anima Mundi, #world cultures, #missionary collections, #ethnographic museums, #anthropology

Researchers
Dr. Maria Bonaria Urban (KNIR)
Dr. Mariana Francoso (Leiden University)