The Roman Catholic bishop of Covington, Ky., released an investigative report on Wednesday that he said showed a group of high school students from his diocese “did not instigate” a widely publicized encounter with a Native American man outside the Lincoln Memorial last month.

“Our students were placed in a situation that was at once bizarre and even threatening,” the bishop, Roger J. Foys, said in a statement with the report. “Their reaction to the situation was, given the circumstances, expected and one might even say laudatory.”

Bishop Foys said the report realized his hope that an investigation would “exonerate” the students.

The diocese hired a private detective agency that developed a detailed account of an encounter that was captured on video and quickly became a lightning rod for political and racial tensions in America.

The mostly white students, many of them wearing “Make America Great Again” gear, were in Washington on Jan. 18 to attend an anti-abortion March for Life rally when they intersected with a Native American man, Nathan Phillips, and others from an Indigenous Peoples March. Nearby, a group of black Hebrew Israelites were shouting slurs at the boys and Native Americans on the scene.