Today, King Charles III became the first head of the Church of England to pray in public alongside a pope at a ceremony in the Vatican led by Leo XIV.
The Vatican’s official press service streamed the event live. It took place as the 76-year-old king and his wife, Queen Camilla, were on a state visit.
Since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome 500 years ago, this is the first occasion a current English or British monarch has prayed alongside a pope in public.
The split happened because the pope at the time wouldn’t let Henry end his marriage so he could marry another woman. This made Henry the head of the separate Church of England.
Charles and Camilla met Pope Leo for the first time earlier. He became the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May after Pope Francis died.
The US pope and Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York and the Church of England’s highest-ranking priest, led the liturgy under Michelangelo’s beautiful ceiling frescoes.
Charles and Camilla sat in the front of the chapel with the pope and the archbishop, facing an audience of politicians, diplomats, and Catholic and Anglican clergy.
The service combined Catholic and Anglican traditions. The choir from the Sistine Chapel sang with the choir from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, which is one of the king’s homes.
It was focused on conservation and conserving the environment, a topic that Charles has long supported.
The 76-year-old king, who is the official head of the Church of England, sailed to Rome on Wednesday night for what Buckingham Palace called a “historic” journey.
The Swiss Guard, the pope’s colorful private bodyguards, received the royals at the Apostolic Palace this morning with a formal guard of honor. After that, they had a private meeting with Leo in the papal library.
Charles is in a tough spot right now because of new information concerning his brother Prince Andrew, who is in the middle of a scandal involving the late US sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
Charles is said to have put pressure on Andrew to give up his title as Duke of York, which he revealed on Friday. He had already stopped doing royal responsibilities in 2019.
Schism
There is still a split between the two groups because of the rupture with Rome, even if they have gotten closer in the last few decades.
Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, was the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the separation in 1961.
In 2013, the legislation was altered so that marrying a Catholic would no longer preclude someone from becoming king or queen, but they still needed to be a Protestant.
Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for fostering Christian unity, argued that the reunion is crucial because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition.”
He told our reporter that this is no longer the case, even though there have been “theological differences in recent decades.”
The Church of England, which is the mother church of the world’s 85 million Anglicans, ordains women and lets priests marry. This is different from the Roman Catholic Church.
Sarah Mullally was just named the first woman Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s highest-ranking clergyman. However, she has not yet officially taken up her job.
Royal Confrater
Charles and Camilla will also go to a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. This is one of the four main papal basilicas and has ties to the English monarchy.
The basilica will make the king a “Royal Confrater” and give him a special chair that he and future British kings can use.
Charles has been to the Vatican many times and met with Pope Francis in private on April 9, just a few days before the pope died.
The king sent his son and heir William to the funeral and his brother Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inaugural mass.
The Catholic Church is celebrating the Jubilee, a year-long event that happens every 25 years and brings millions of people to the Vatican.
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