Nearly every English schoolchild is taught about how Henry VIII, a swaggering Tudor-era king driven by lust as well as his pursuit for an heir, separated from Rome's Roman Catholic church during the 16th century when the Vatican declined to annul his union with Catherine of Aragon.
Henry established the Church of England, named his own person its supreme governor, divorced his queen and married Anne Boleyn (she remained only 36 months before her execution for treason).
Henry did not end at that. He initiated conflict on Catholicism, ordering monasteries to be destroyed, land and valuables confiscated, books and documents set ablaze, and clergy members put to death.
For hundreds of years, Catholics across Britain were prohibited from public religious practice. Up until the mid-20th century, mixed marriages involving Catholics and Protestants were frowned upon.
Now, nearly 500 years after the Tudor king's momentous breakaway, his successor, King Charles III, has joined in prayer with Pope Leo XIV under the sublime frescoes within the Vatican as a gesture of rapprochement linking the Roman Catholic church and the Anglican Communion.
“The era of mutual suspicion truly is now over,” Jamie Hawkey, a canon-theologian at Westminster Abbey, stated.
“Seventy years ago, it was not possible for members of both churches to go into one another’s churches without provoking great offence. This represents an occasion when past divisions can be seen to be healed.”
Conflict, strife, and hostility defined relations among the faithful over many years. The Tudor queen was labeled a heretic and excommunicated by the papacy during the 16th century.
During that era, a conspiracy by Catholic conspirators including Guy Fawkes to destroy the Houses of Parliament with the monarch present was prevented.
The 1701 Act of Settlement confirmed a prohibition on a Catholic or their spouse succeeding to the throne.
However since the middle of the last century, ties between the C of E and the Roman Catholic church have improved, with regular visits to Rome by royalty and church leaders.
In 2013, new legislation eased limitations on royal heirs wedding Roman Catholics, although the monarch must still be an Anglican.
Earlier this year, King Charles and Queen Camilla made a private visit to the pontiff shortly prior to his death. And in September, the king became the first monarch in 500 years to be present at a Catholic mass while participating in the funeral of a royal convert, who embraced the Catholic faith.
Recent decades had seen an “extraordinary rediscovery of shared heritage”, said Hawkey, while acknowledging that major differences persisted.
“This country has a long history of difficulties with Rome, of friction ever since the Reformation,” Catherine Pepinster commented.
“We have traveled a great distance … but until now it was unseen the supreme head of the Church of England – that is, the monarch – kneeling in prayer alongside the head of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.”
