Pope Leo Prays With King Charles

I've already said that I'm staying away from the female Archbishop of Canterbury story, but this latest quasi-ecumenical gesture is mostly unrelated, and it has me scratching my head:

King Charles III and Queen Camilla prayed Thursday [October 16] with Pope Leo XIV in an historic visit to the Vatican to forge closer relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church, a welcome spiritual respite for the royals from the turmoil at home over sexual misconduct allegations against Prince Andrew.

Charles, who is the titular head of the Church of England, and Camilla sat in golden thrones on the raised altar of the Sistine Chapel, in front of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” while Leo and the Anglican archbishop of York presided over an ecumenical service.

Although one of King Charles's titles is "Supreme Governor of the Church of England", as the UK constitutional monarchy has developed, his role vis-a-vis the Church is exclusively to appoint bishops on the recommendation of the Crown Nominations Commission via the Prime Minister. If he were either to refuse to appoint a bishop as nominated or attempt to remove a bishop, it would cause a major constitutional crisis.

A few weeks ago, Charles in his ceremonial capacity met with President Trump, and each said nice things to each other about shared language and political traditions. Charles's ecumenical gensture with Pope Leo amounted to each saying nice things to each other about the Almighty, and it has nothing to do with theological issues relating to the Reformation, which Charles likely doesn't understand very clearly in any case, and which he would have no power to affect if he did.

On the other hand, I wonder if Pope Leo is even aware of Pope Benedict's 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus -- I've never met a US diocesan priest who was aware of it -- which provided primarily for the admission of dissident Anglican and Episcopalian parishes into the Catholic Church as a body, including the ordination of their Anglican or Episcopalian clergy. Even in the increasing pansexualization of Anglicanism, this has had little appeal to conservatives.

For example, although the Catholic Church's interpretation of Anglicanorum Coetibus makes Methodist parishes and their clergy eligible to join, following the recent schism in the United Methodist Church over issues like same-sex marriage that gave UMC parishes the option to leave the UMC and join other denominations -- and thousands of UMC parishes chose this path -- absolutely none chose to become Catholic via Anglicanorum Coetibus, even though they were fully eligible to do this from the viewpoints of both the UMC and the Vatican.

So it's very difficult to say what it would mean to "forge closer relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church", especially since the Church of England has effectively abandoned the uneasy compromise among Protestant factions on which it settled during the Elizabethan period. The compromises between radical and less radical reformers, with an element of superficial Catholic atmosphere grafted on in the 19th century, would find the current Anglicanism of female bishops and same-sex marriage unrecognizable and utterly repellent.

In this context, GAFCON, the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, just this month formally separated itself from the Anglican Communion headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was prompted by the appointment of a female Archbishop, which as the panel in the video embedded at the top of this post discussed, created some level of awkwardness even for the meeting of Leo and Charles -- it would apparently have been unseemly to include Her Grace in the meeting, and His Grace the Archbishop of York stood in as a surrogate.

But this leaves the meaning of the encounter between Leo and Charles even less clear. The King has absolutely no effective power over the Church of England, but this hardly matters, since at this point a majority of global Anglicans are outside the Anglican Communion, while even in the UK, the percentage of Church of England membership appears to be around 12-16%, with only about 1% attending services weekly.

The ambiguity is reflected in the panel in the video above, which has chosen Calvin Robinson, a prominent conservative figure, as a representative Anglican. The problem is that as far as anyone can determine, although he wears a clerical collar, Robinson's ordination is not currently recognized by any Anglican denomination. According to Wikipedia,

Robinson trained at St Stephen's House, Oxford, from 2020 with the hope of being ordained in the Church of England, but he was unsuccessful in his application for a curacy. In 2022, he was ordained as a deacon in the Free Church of England, a conservative Confessing Anglican denomination, which he left in 2023 to join the Nordic Catholic Church, a conservative Old Catholic denomination of High Church Lutheran patrimony, which ordained him as a priest.

In 2024 he moved to the United States to become a priest in the Anglican Catholic Church, a Continuing Anglican denomination. The Anglican Catholic Church removed Robinson on 29 January 2025, four days after he ended a speech with a gesture which the church said had been widely interpreted as a "pro-Nazi salute", in an apparent reference to Elon Musk's similar gesture earlier that month. In May 2025, Robinson's parish voted to disaffiliate from the ACC, and he was granted a temporary license by Bishop Ray Sutton of the Reformed Episcopal Church, part of the Anglican Church in North America. This was revoked nine days later after criticism from ACNA archbishop Steve Wood.

Both the Anglican Catholic Church and the Reformed Episcopal Church are splinter denominations that left the US Episcopal Church, about 50 years ago and 150 years ago respectively. Certainly for Robinson, they, like all the tiny substitute denominations he's been through, were ports of convenience, but they give an indication that there are very few potential platforms for high-profile conservative Anglicans. Certainly Robinson would be a more visible figure than any splinter-denomination bishop who would license him to preach, and that's probably the biggest part of his problem -- no conservative splinter denomination could support a prominent apologist, much less a Bp Barron or an Abp Fulton Sheen.

But we're left with a puzzle: what does it mean to "forge closer relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church" when King Charles can do nothing to further that end, while most Anglicans are no longer part of the Anglican Communion, of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is head -- except that it was apparently deemed politic not to include Her Grace in that meeting meant to "forge closer relations" in any case?