Nearly every British student learns that King Henry the Eighth, the swaggering Tudor-era monarch driven by lust as well as his quest for a male successor, separated from Rome's Catholic faith in 1534 when the pope declined to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon.
Henry created the Anglican Church, appointed his own person its highest authority, divorced Catherine then married his next wife (she lasted only 36 months prior to she was beheaded on treason charges).
The monarch did not end at that. He declared war against Catholicism, commanding religious houses to be demolished, property and treasures seized, books and documents set ablaze, as well as priests, monks and abbots executed.
For hundreds of years, Catholics across Britain were prohibited from public religious practice. Up until the 1950s, mixed marriages involving Catholics and Protestants were discouraged.
Today, almost five hundred years following Henry’s momentous breakaway, his successor, King Charles III, has joined in prayer with the Holy Father under the magnificent paintings within the Vatican in an act of rapprochement linking the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England.
“The era of mutual suspicion truly is at an end,” a theologian, an ecclesiastical scholar at Westminster Abbey, remarked.
“Seventy years ago, it was unthinkable for members of both churches to enter each other's places of worship without provoking great offence. This represents an occasion when history can be seen to be healed.”
Conflict, strife, and hostility characterised relations among the faithful over many years. Queen Elizabeth I was labeled an unbeliever and expelled by the papacy in 1570.
During that era, a plot involving Catholic plotters such as Guy Fawkes to blow up the British legislature with the Protestant King James I inside was prevented.
A historic law reinforced a ban on a Catholic or their spouse ascending the monarchy.
However from the mid-point of the last century, ties between Anglicans and Catholics have improved, through repeated trips to Rome by senior royals and archbishops of Canterbury.
In 2013, new legislation relaxed restrictions for those in line to the throne wedding Roman Catholics, even though the monarch must still be an Anglican.
Earlier this year, King Charles and Queen Camilla made a private visit to Pope Francis shortly prior to his death. And in September, the king became the first monarch in half a millennium to publicly attend a Catholic mass when he attended the funeral of a royal convert, who embraced the Catholic faith.
The past 60 years have witnessed an “extraordinary rediscovery of shared heritage”, noted the scholar, while admitting that major differences persisted.
“Britain has an extensive past of challenges with Rome, of friction ever since the religious split,” an author commented.
“We’ve come a very long way … but until now it was unseen the highest leader of the Church of England – namely, the monarch – praying on bended knee alongside the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.”
