“That’s the thing about the monarchy. We paper over the cracks. And if what we do is loud and grand and confident enough, no one will notice that all around us it’s fallen apart.” This is what Princess Margaret says to Queen Elizabeth II, in season 3 episode 10 of the celebrated TV series The Crown. Princess Margaret reminds her sister, the queen, of the need to keep a cool head in times of crisis. “Paper over” could be one of the possible ways to describe the October 23, 2025, history-making meeting between King Charles III, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and Pope Leo XIV, the leader of the Catholic Church. The British monarch had met the pope before in the previous century, beginning with King Edward VII and Leo XIII in 1903, until Elizabeth II and Pope Francis met in 2014. But in the past, visits made by the British monarch to the Vatican were labelled “informal” or “private visits”, thus sidestepping the political, diplomatic, and ecumenical complications surrounding the meeting of the leaders of two officially separated (since Henry VIII’s decision in 1534) branches of the Christian family.
This time, the meeting was a very public affair, with Leo XIV receiving the king in the Vatican spaces where the heads of state and religious leaders are received. It was not only a public event, but public par excellence, that is, with a liturgical component: not a civil liturgy typical of Buckingham Palace’s pageantry, but a Christian liturgy, a moment of ecumenical prayer. For the first time after the Reformation, an English monarch and the pope of the Catholic Church prayed together. King Charles was formally named “Royal Confrater of Saint Paul” and also went to the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, where a special chair had been commissioned for him. For Pope Leo XIV, Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles had approved two British honors: “Papal Confrater” of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.
The intra-Catholic reactions have ranged from the indifferent (secularization is making room for the post-secular, but it is far from over), to the sarcastic (in countries like the United States, where Catholicism has deep ambivalences – to say the least – towards the British and its monarchy) to the incensed (especially among the moralists who think the pope should not meet with a divorced and remarried monarch – an eerie similarity with Henry VIII, the first head of the new Church of England five centuries ago). The intra-Protestant reactions have been interesting to watch in light of the history of the different (sometimes radically opposed) dispositions among Protestants vis-à-vis the role of the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which some religious leaders see as theologically illegitimate. Some even expressed that they felt betrayed by the king.
The “papering over” effect of the meeting between Charles III and Leo XIV concerns the fact that they both preside over different but similarly divided global communities of Christians. The division is no longer about the 16th-century conflicting theologies of the relations between papal authority and the right of monarchs to govern religion in their nations, and even less sacramental theology or the role of Scripture or liturgy. Today it’s about – and a common point of tension for both churches internally – the role of women in ordained ministry (as deacons, priests, and bishops) and the real and not just nominal inclusion of LGBTQ members in the life of the Church. During the pontificate of Francis, a number of conservative and traditionalist Catholics – and many bishops, especially in Africa – publicly dissented from the Vatican’s permission to bless same-sex couples issued in December 2023. The prohibition in Catholic teaching of the ordination of women is number one, or very high, in the list of demands for change coming from progressive Catholics in the Western world.
The Church of England and the Anglican Communion are in even more troubled waters. The decisions on these two issues that the Anglicans took in the last fifty years (at the same time when the Vatican postponed or prohibited them) have created a new discipline and tradition within Anglicanism in the Western world, but also a deep and formal fracture within the Anglican Communion, where Africa is again the most significant dissenting voice. This internal rift has been amplified by the election in October of the first woman Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, who will take office in January 2026. The reactions to the election of Mullally, which deepen and amplify a situation of institutional separation within the Anglican Communion, were voiced by the new center of global Anglicanism, that is, Africa, just a few weeks before the visit of King Charles to the Vatican.
In light of all this, was this high-profile meeting of Leo XIV and Charles III in the Vatican just – to quote another episode of The Crown where the Church of England appears prominently – “smoke and mirrors”? Not quite. The relations between the Vatican and the British monarchy are very good and better than ever, despite the internal difficulties that both churches experience and which will persist for a long time. But this meeting says something interesting about the internal evolution of the role of supreme leadership in both Churches – not only in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, which embraced ecumenism and a more ecumenical understanding of the meaning of “bishop of Rome”, confirmed by the 2024 document of the Vatican Dicastery for Christian Unity. On the other side, “Elizabeth II and now Charles III have quietly reframed the Church of England’s establishment in law – intended to defend it to the exclusion of other confessions – as a mission of service to all, the guarantor of the free practice of faith in general”, as British Catholic commentator Austen Ivereigh wrote on Commonweal Magazine.
This meeting of Leo XIV and Charles III was a manifestation of a new kind of ecumenism that leaves aside the classical ecumenical hard questions of theology and church discipline. There is a new ecumenical unity on extra-ecclesiastical affairs that has to do with the realization of the responsibilities of the churches and religion in the care of the one human family on the one planet Earth. It is a “humanitarian ecumenism” that has been practiced by different kinds of Christians and believers already for a long time around the world. Now it is recognized at the highest level.
It is an important kind of ecumenism because it silently but eloquently offers a critique of another kind of non-theological ecumenism that has dominated English-speaking Christianity in the last thirty years more or less, the “political ecumenism” in America: the Protestant Evangelical “Christian right” allied with Catholic “neo-conservatives”, which morphed into something more extremist in the early 2000s and was critiqued by a now famous article published during the pontificate of Francis in the Jesuit-run and Vatican-vetted journal La Civiltà Cattolica.
Trumpism has absorbed and destroyed the credibility of that kind of Catholic-Protestant alliance: the right-wing forces behind “Make America Great Again” no longer need that theological tutelage. It’s a wild new world for the relations between different Christian Churches and religious traditions, often deeply influenced, if not hijacked, by political and nationalist agendas. Pope Leo XIV and King Charles III have sent a message and made a statement about this new and dangerous situation.
Cover photo: Pope Leo XIV bids farewell to Britain’s King Charles III and Britain’s Queen Camilla in San Damaso courtyard during their State visit to the Vatican on October 23, 2025. (Photo by Alberto Pizzoli / AFP)
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