VATICAN CITY: Britain’s King Charles and Pope Leo prayed together in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel on Thursday, in the first joint worship including an English monarch and a Catholic pontiff since King Henry VIII broke away from Rome in 1534.
Latin chants and English prayers echoed through the chapel, where Leo was elected the first US pope by the world’s Catholic cardinals six months ago in front of frescoes by Michelangelo depicting Christ delivering the Last Judgment.
Charles, supreme governor of the Church of England, was seated at the pope’s left near the altar of the chapel as Leo and Anglican Archbishop Stephen Cottrell led a service that featured the Sistine Chapel Choir and two royal choirs.
Although Charles has met the last three popes, and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI travelled to Britain, their previous encounters never included joint prayers.
The King and Queen Camilla are on a state visit to the Vatican marking the closening ties between the Catholic Church and Anglican Communion, five centuries after their turbulent separation.
“There is a strong sense that this moment in the extraordinary setting of the Sistine Chapel offers a kind of healing of history,” Anglican Rev. James Hawkey, canon theologian of Westminster Abbey, told Reuters.
“This would have been impossible just a generation ago,” he said. “It represents how far our churches have come over the last 60 years of dialogue.”
Cottrell, the Anglican Archbishop of York, stood in at the Sistine Chapel service for Sarah Mullally. She was recently announced as the first woman to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, but will not take the role until next year.
The split between the Catholic Church and the Church of England was formalized in 1534, after Pope Clement VII refused to annul King Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Henry’s desire for a male heir — and a new wife who might provide one — was the immediate catalyst, but other factors were also at play, involving the English crown’s seizure of church assets and the growth of Protestant ideas in England. As England swung between Catholicism and Protestantism during the reigns of Henry’s daughters Mary I and Elizabeth I, hundreds of Catholics and Protestants were executed for their faith, often burned at the stake.
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Charles and Camilla, who visited the Vatican earlier this year to see Pope Francis, also had a private meeting with Leo on Thursday morning. At home in Britain, Charles’ disgraced brother Prince Andrew is engulfed in a deepening crisis over abuse allegations and his ties with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
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