From RNS:
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 on Monday morning (April 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 woman 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.
Mullally herself has said that she is looking forward to working with Leo.
“As I prepare to make this pilgrimage, I know that I follow in the footsteps of those who have come before me, and I give thanks for the deepening dialogue and fellowship between Anglicans and Catholics over the last 60 years,” she said in a statement released on Friday (April 24). “It is a joy and privilege to meet and pray with His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, and I look forward to our time of conversation and prayer.”
But the visit also has significant implications for both the archbishop and pope and their standing in the world. Mullally and her advisers have chosen her trip to Rome as her first visit abroad since she was installed last month, rather than a location in the Anglican Communion.
The archbishop’s website notes:
On Sunday morning, Archbishop Sarah will preside at Sung Eucharist with Holy Baptism at All Saints’, Anglican Church Rome, the Church of England congregation in the city, before preaching at Evensong at St Paul’s Within the Walls, a part of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, later in the afternoon. During the day, she will also make pilgrim visits to pray at the Papal Basilica and Cathedral of St John Lateran and the Papal Basilica of St Mary Major.
On Monday evening, Archbishop Sarah will officiate at Choral Evensong at the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, during which she will commission Bishop Anthony Ball, Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Representative to the Holy See. The preacher will be His Eminence Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, a Pro-Prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation.
The pilgrimage will conclude on Tuesday with visits to the Joel Nafuma Refugee Centre (JNRC) at St Paul’s Within the Walls and to projects run by the Sant’Egidio Community.