By Catherine Pepinster
Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally will travel to Rome this weekend to meet Pope Leo XIV — a visit she calls a pilgrimage, akin to the one she took to prepare for her installation at Canterbury.
Her four-day visit, which will include an audience with the pope at the Vatican Apr 27, will follow in the footsteps of countless other pilgrims when she visits the tombs of St Peter and St Paul. It will also follow past archbishops of Canterbury who have traveled to see the pope since 1966, encounters that reinvented ecumenical relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, as well as the wider Anglican Communion.
But what will be remarkable about this visit is the optics: the sight of Mullally, the first female archbishop of Canterbury, standing shoulder to shoulder and kneeling in prayer with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, which still maintains a male-only priesthood.
All the signs are that there will be undoubted warmth between the two church leaders. Three Catholic cardinals — Timothy Radcliffe and Vincent Nichols from England and Wales, and Cardinal Kurt Koch, head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity — and five Catholic archbishops attended Mullally’s installation service at Canterbury. Pope Leo also sent a message of greeting to her.
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