Something Wholly New

It was a Buckingham Palace press briefing that framed the story of King Charles III’s meeting with Pope Leo XIV on October 23: “King to be first British monarch to pray with Pope in at least 500 years.” This implied that before the Reformation it was somehow common for English kings to pray with popes, but it wasn’t. Most English kings never even saw the pope, and it’s not clear if those who did—such as Æthelwulf, King of Wessex, who was in Rome for the inauguration of Pope Leo IV in 855—ever prayed with him. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, at least, it never happened. So Pope Leo and King Charles presiding at a joint ecumenical service in the Sistine Chapel under Michelangelo’s frescoes —painted in the years immediately after Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534—was much more than restoring a tradition. It was doing something wholly new. And that new thing was all the more remarkable in view of the breakdown of the world order now.