If any year can be said to have made a difference to the United Kingdom’s relationship with the Holy See, it is 1982. Today Catholics recall it as the year when a pope first set foot on Britain’s soil, but reaching that point took hundreds of years. And there was a stumbling block along the way – it was the visit that nearly didn’t happen.
Relations with Rome had been severed, of course, with the Reformation when Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church. It was not until 1914 that the UK established a presence in Rome again, when the Foreign Office realised at the outbreak of war that a resident envoy to the Holy See might be useful in counteracting the influence of the German and Austrian ambassadors on the papacy.
