Vatican Metropolis — King Charles III met Thursday with Pope Leo XIV throughout a state go to to the Vatican, and the British monarch made historical past as the primary head of the Church of England to wish publicly with a pontiff.
The 76-year-old king, who, by advantage of his position because the monarch additionally holds the title of supreme governor of the mom church of Anglicanism, flew to Rome Wednesday night along with his spouse, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” journey.
The royals had been greeted on the Apostolic Palace on Thursday morning by a ceremonial guard of honor by the Swiss Guard, the pope’s colourful personal bodyguards, earlier than a non-public assembly with Chicago native Leo within the papal library.
It was Charles’s first assembly with Pope Leo, who took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in Could following the dying of Pope Francis.
Yara Nardi/REUTERS 
The king and queen joined an ecumenical service at noon (1000 GMT) within the Sistine Chapel led by Leo and the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, presently the senior cleric of the Church of England.
Broadcast reside by Vatican media, it was the primary time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome 500 years in the past.
Triggered by then-Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annul Henry’s marriage so he may marry one other lady, the schism made the monarch the top of the separate Church of England.
The break with Rome created a schism that is still to today, even when there was a major rapprochement in latest a long time.
In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mom, grew to become the primary British monarch to go to the Holy See because the break up.
Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, was centered on conservation and defending the setting, a trigger lengthy championed by Charles. It introduced collectively Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that of Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Fortress, one of many king’s residences.
The go to comes at a fragile time for Charles following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who’s mired in a scandal surrounding late U.S. sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Andrew introduced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly below strain from Charles and Prince William, the king’s son and inheritor and Andrew’s nephew. Andrew had already stepped again from his official royal duties in 2019.
Charles has visited the Vatican a number of instances and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, simply days earlier than the pontiff’s dying. The king despatched Prince William to the funeral and his brother Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.
