King Charles III spread ecumenical cheer October 23 as he prayed with Pope Leo XIV in the Sistine Chapel. He was accompanied by Queen Camilla and Archbishop Stephen Cottrell of York, who is overseeing the Church of England in the interim period until Bishop Sarah Mullally becomes the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury in January.
The visit tapped into a powerful moment as these two Christians, leading global institutions long separated by the historic divisions of the English Reformation and the wars that followed, gathered for prayer inside the Sistine Chapel. Pope Leo and Archbishop Cottrell sat together on one side of the chapel while King Charles and Queen Camilla were at the other side. All four faced a Vatican congregation that had gathered for the service.
All stood for the brief prayers, which were familiar to those who join in Morning Prayer.
The royal couple later attended services at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, where King Charles received the title of Royal Confrater of Saint Paul. The king and queen had planned the same sort of visit with Pope Francis last year, but the pope’s failing health overrode those plans.
Sean Coughlan, who covers the Royal family for the BBC, captured the king calling news cameras a “constant hazard” in his life.
“Rather laconically the Pope said: ‘You get used to it,’ as he too has faced a rapid lesson in the unrelenting attention that comes with such a high-profile role, although it still seems a surprise to hear a Pope speaking in such relaxed American tones,” Coughlan wrote.
Coughlan also described “a serene moment with the singing of a piece by the English Catholic composer Thomas Tallis.”
“He lived in south London during the some of the vicious and violent religious conflicts of the 16th Century, making his music against this troubled background,” Coughlan added about Tallis. “Five centuries later, his music was being played for a King and a Pope, who were no longer fighting but were on same side.”
Harriet Sherwood of The Guardian focused on the implications of this rapprochement between pope and king.
She quoted the Rev. Dr. James Hawkey, a canon theologian at Westminster Abbey and Chair of the Westminster Abbey Institute: “The age of mutual suspicion really is now over.”
“Seventy years ago, it was not possible for Catholics and Anglicans to go into one another’s churches without causing great offence,” Canon Hawkey added in Sherwood’s report. “This is a moment where history can be seen to be healed.”
Father Martin Browne, an Irish Benedictine priest who leads the Vatican’s ecumenical engagement with Anglicans through the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, offered further detail to Vatican News about the king’s new title.
“With the King becoming a Royal Confrater, he was ‘welcomed formally to the Basilica and seated in a very special chair that has been created for the occasion,’ which bears his coat of arms and the verse in Latin from the Gospel of John, Ut unum sint (‘That they may be one’).'”
The Vatican News report by Isabella H. de Carvalho and Xavier Sartre also highlighted that the Vatican and the Church of England were both blessed by the life and theology of Saint John Henry Newman.
“St. John Henry Newman spent half of his life as a member, and later a priest, of the Church of England, and half of his life as a member and later a cardinal of the Catholic Church,” Browne said in Vatican News. He is “a very significant figure in the joint history of faith and witness of our two traditions.”
“The Church of England very strongly and warmly supported both his canonization and the recent decision of the Holy Father to declare him a Doctor of the Church,” he said.
While he was still Prince of Wales, Charles attended Newman’s canonization in 2019, and he has visited Newman’s rooms at the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in Birmingham.
The Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, former Anglican Bishop of Rochester who is now a priest for the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, voiced his expectation of conversions more than deeper ecumenism.
“We can keep talking in a friendly way, as we do with people of other faiths—but any hope of restoring organic unity between our church traditions has, short of some miracle, gone out of the window,” Nazir-Ali told Jonathan Luxmoore of OSV News.
“We can also cooperate, but not on questions relating to marriage and the family,” Nazir-Ali added. “In the meantime, the Catholic Church should be prepared for new groups of Anglicans seeking union with it, as during previous conversion waves.”
Douglas LeBlanc is an Associate Editor and writes about Christianity and culture. He and his wife, Monica, attend St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Henrico, Virginia.
