The King at the Vatican

On Thursday I watched the television coverage of the state visit by King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the Vatican and what bit was available of their subsequent visit to St Paul’s Outside the Walls.

The meeting with Pope Leo XIV and the service of Midday Prayer in the Sistine Chapel was dignified, and historic, if not quite for the reasons claimed in advance. 

So far as I know the exchange of chivalric orders between a Pope and a British monarch had not occurred before. The Papal order received by The King was the Collar of the Order of Pius IX. There is more about the Order from Wikipedia at Order of Pope Pius IX

I do have to agree with articles in the Catholic Herald and the Daily Telegraph that this occasion was the first time in something like five and a half centuries that a Pope and an English or British monarch had prayed together was misleading, implying that such occasions were almost routine in medieval centuries.

We know Anglo Saxon kings from the House of Wessex, ancestors of the King, including the future King Alfred, visited Rome on occasion, or like King Caedwalla who abdicated and retired there and built a church whilst living as a hermit, but thereafter, such visits or meetings were rare. 

King Cnut, while attending the Roman coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II in 1027 would have met Pope John XIX and from Scotland King Macbeth in 1050 would have met Pope Leo IX. 

After 1066 King Henry I met Pope Calixtus II at Reims in 1119, whilst King Edward I and Pope Gregory X had met on crusade before their respective successions in the Holy Land in the early 1270s and again in Italy after the Pope’s election in 1272. The next reigning monarch from these realms to meet a Pope was King Edward VII who met Pope Leo XIII in 1903, King George V who visited Pope Pius XI in 1924, and then there were the visits to the Vatican by the late Queen, initially as Princess to Pope Pius XII, and his successors, and welcoming two of them to this country.

Jacobites might opine, of course, that in the eighteenth century the three claimant Stuart Kings, James III and VIII, the other Charles III, and Henry IX and I - who are all buried in St Peter’s - regularly met Popes, although only the first was officially recognised as monarch by the Papacy. Some of the later Stuart claimants as Italian and Bavarian rulers doubtless met other Popes.

Similarly the revival of the English royal link with St Paul’s Basilica and Abbey by making His Majesty the Royal Conrator on lines similar to those between France and the Lateran and Spain and Sta Maria Maggiore is a good and positive, as well as historic, thing to do. So too was the gift to His Holiness of the status of Papal Confrator of St George’s Windsor. 

I am sure this, quite rightly, appeals to The King’s sense of history and his genuine commitment to inter-church relations. 

We have indeed, happily, come a long way from the sixteenth century reformations and the active, or indeed passive, discrimination against Catholics here in the UK, even if relics of it still survive.

At same time, as some of the better informed commentators have pointed out, however the real theological differences remain - exemplified by the announcement of the impending appointment of Dame Sarah Mullaly - I wonder if that should be Doolally or Mulligatawny - as “Archbishopess”of Canterbury and the further splintering, if not shattering, of the Anglican Communion.

It occurs to me that the ecclesial changes within the King’s lifetime have made the dialogue between Rome and Canterbury, for all the high level meetings, the work of ARCIC, and the much more obviously friendly personal relationships that have developed on an individual and institutional basis, actually more difficult. This is has been due to the importation of new - and very dubious - ideas by many Anglicans. For all the outward distance the communions headed by Pope Pius XII and Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher had fundamentally more in common than they do today.