Pope Leo xiv prayed with Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally at the Vatican yesterday in another sign of the ongoing reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England.

• Mullally—controversially—became the first female archbishop of the Church of England on March 25. The church leads the Anglican Communion, which has more than 100 million members.
• Her first foreign visit, an indication of her priorities for the church, is a four-day trip to Vatican City and Rome to “strengthen Anglican-Roman Catholic relations … and encourage ongoing collaboration at both global and local levels,” according to Anglican Communion News Service.

These two churches will reunite. Few anticipate this, but Bible prophecy forecast it 2,000 years before the Church of England broke away from Rome in 1534.

• On the visit, Pope Leo xiv said the two churches must use “every possible opportunity to proclaim Christ to the world together” and said “it would also be a scandal if we did not continue to work towards overcoming our differences, no matter how intractable they may appear.”

The pope referenced the two churches’ “continuing challenges.” Among these are disagreements over the Church of England’s ordination of female priests in 1992 and the appointment of a female archbishop in 2026. The pope’s comments made clear that the latter makes reconciliation even more difficult.

• Yet hosting Mullally, praying with her, and discussing overcoming their differences is consistent with something the Roman Catholic Church has proven masterful at across two millenniums: negotiating, compromising and ultimately incorporating and dominating a variety of non-Christian and non-Catholic teachings and practices, always under the authority of the bishop of Rome.

“[T]he Protestants are in the process of being reunited with the Catholic Church under the pope’s rule,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in 2007. To see what the Bible prophesies about the future of Anglicans and other Protestants, read “Anglicans Submitting to the Pope.”