Today, King Charles and Queen Camilla will begin their state visit to the Holy See. “Fantastic,” you might say, and there has been the same upbeat reaction from the papers, broadcasters, and social media. Much of the excitable coverage focuses on this particular claim, put out last week in a Buckingham Palace press briefing: “King to be first British monarch to pray with Pope in at least 500 years.”
This all sounds very impressive. After all, relations between Rome and Canterbury, though cordial in recent decades, have been fraught for centuries, and Pope Leo XIV’s own namesake, Pope Leo XIII, declared in Apostolicae Curae that “ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void.” Here, then, it seems, is confirmation that the monarch and the Pope have reset relations to where they were before 1535.
