Something Wholly New
It was a Buckingham Palace press briefing that framed the story of King Charles III’s meeting with Pope Leo XIV on October 23: “King to be first British monarch to pray with Pope in at least 500 years.” This implied that before the Reformation it was somehow common for English kings to pray with popes, but it wasn’t. Most English kings never even saw the pope, and it’s not clear if those who did—such as Æthelwulf, King of Wessex, who was in Rome for the inauguration of Pope Leo I in 855—ever prayed with him. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, at least, it never happened. So Pope Leo and King Charles presiding at a joint ecumenical service in the Sistine Chapel under Michelangelo’s frescoes —painted in the years immediately after Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534—was much more than restoring a tradition. It was doing something wholly new. And that new thing was all the more remarkable in view of the breakdown of the world order now.
It was of course a state visit, so Charles III arrived in his Bentley (it runs on biofuels), which was flown out for the occasion, and was received in the San Damaso courtyard with a guard of honor and a band striking up the UK’s anthem, “God Save the King,” which is not something you hear a lot in the Vatican. But it was also, and more importantly, a visit by a spiritual leader: the King came as supreme governor of the Church of England, whose Protestant faith he swore to uphold at his coronation. After a warm audience with Leo XIV in the Apostolic Palace—where they discussed the environment, poverty, the history of the Church in the UK, and ecumenical dialogue—Charles III introduced the pope to the Church of England leaders who had come with him, led by Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York. (This wasn’t, as some thought, because Sarah Mullaly, the new archbishop of Canterbury, is a woman, but because she has yet to be installed.)
For those who geek out over symbols, the presents exchanged between pontiff and monarch had fascinating resonances. Charles gifted an icon of that most spiritual of English kings, Edward the Confessor (d.1066), and received from Leo a mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, or “ruler of all” (that is, spiritual and temporal). Other exchanges were of the chivalric kind, each making the other a member of ancient orders. Charles made the equestrian pope a Knight of the Order of the Bath, an honor traditionally given to heads of state (which, of course, Leo is), while Leo made Charles a Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Vatican Order of Pope Pius IX. The Collar is the Order’s highest rank, and usually bestowed on Catholic heads of state, so you can see why a fierce Ulster Protestant like the Rev. Ian Paisley’s son might respond to the king’s acceptance of this title by demanding that he abdicate.
And that was just the start of it, because later that day the royal couple went to St Paul’s Outside the Walls for a ceremony co-opting the king into its ancient confraternity. The basilica, attached to a Benedictine Abbey, has a centuries-long connection to the English crown that was broken by Henry VIII’s funk. Its restoration is therefore a significant gesture “of our commitment to the fraternal task of the ecumenical movement,” as the formal declaration of fraternity declared. The honor of “Royal Confrater” came with a special chair, on which Charles sat and which will remain in the basilica for English monarchs to use whenever they come. It is decorated with the royal coat of arms and bears the words “Ut Unum Sint” (“That they may be one”) from John 17, the Gospel read by Archbishop Cottrell. The service ended with “Praise to the Holiest in the Height,” the hymn from The Dream of Gerontius by John Henry Newman, the famous Anglican convert, now a saint, whom Leo has proclaimed a Doctor of the Church. (Before he was King, Charles was in Rome for Newman’s canonization, and spoke beautifully of him).
Ut unum sint was the title of Pope St. John Paul II’s famous 1995 encyclical on Christian unity, in which he had asked the other Christian churches to find—“together, of course”—ways in which the ministry of the bishop of Rome “may accomplish a service of love recognized by all concerned.” At the start of his pontificate, in Evangelii gaudium, Pope Francis noted how little progress had been made on that front, calling for a decentralization and “pastoral conversion” of the papacy. In 2015, he moved that along decisively by committing the Church to the path of synodality, noting in his famous speech in October of that year how this necessarily affected the exercise of the Petrine ministry in ways that had clear implications for ecumenical dialogue: the pope no longer alone and above, but within and with, the College of Bishops and the wider Christian Church.
In 2022, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ut unum sint, the Vatican’s Christian Unity dicastery took advantage of the Synod on Synodality to start a series of consultations with other churches in response to the Polish pope’s request. Last year it shared the fruit of those consultations: a major document on primacy and synodality called The Bishop of Rome. Like other Christian churches, the Anglicans, it turns out, favor the idea of a papal ministry in the service of wider Christian unity—even if they remain queasy at the notion of obeying such an office.
The monarchy, too, has made significant moves in the past decade. True, the English monarch must still be a Protestant, and the 1688 oath that Charles had to pronounce at his coronation two years ago is obnoxious in today’s plural world. (It is also, in his case, hypocritical, given his deep ties to Greek Orthodoxy.) But pity the English monarch or archbishop that dares to unpick the complex unwritten threads tying church to state. And anyway, Elizabeth II and now Charles III have quietly reframed the Church of England’s establishment in law —intended to defend it to the exclusion of other confessions—as a mission of service to all, the guarantor of the free practice of faith in general.
Yet these moves, barely noticed by the wider public, have not stopped the unhealthy confusion of English nationalism and Protestantism, which in recent years has fueled a toxic mix of superiority and resentment among the so-called “left-behind” populations. Brexit and the recent “Raise the Colors” campaign draw on the myth of a proud reformed Protestant island standing alone against foreigners—then Catholics, now Muslims—apparently bent on undermining it. The men (it is mostly men) who cover town centers with flags of the St. George’s Cross, spilling over into anti-migrant hate riots, are far more likely to beat their wives than go to church, yet identify as “white Christians.”
So to see the pope and an English king in Rome, praying together for our common home, committing their respective churches to the same Christian cause of peace, fraternity, and integral ecology, is to witness a powerful counter-narrative. There is no denying that the divisions remain—over the ordination of women, the validity of Anglican orders, and so on—but that, surely, is the point: those differences cannot stop the common witness, the living and walking together, that John 17 calls for. Such fraternal cooperation and joint witness allow Catholics and Anglicans to work on the fissures that could be closed, while leaving aside those that, at least for now, are going to remain.
Because the Leo-Charles pray-together commits their churches to stand together against the disintegrating forces of Christian nationalism, it was providential that the meeting took place under Leo and not Francis, as had originally been planned. Here was the English king, stripped of all practical temporal power, coming as a spiritual leader to meet a pope from Chicago, who is a head of state without armies or significant territory. The ironies abounded. In America, which had once sought emancipation from an English monarch’s despotic power, there were now “No Kings” riots in protest against a democratically elected president claiming just such power. In Rome, meanwhile, pope and king—gentlemen both, gracious in their dealings, humble and patient—met not so much to restore a tradition as to inaugurate a new one: nothing less than a pax americana et anglicana.
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