Queen to meet pope at Vatican for the first time Monarch and pontiff to meet in papal study with Falkland Islands and Anglican-Catholic relations potentially thorny issues Lizzy Davies in Vatican City theguardian, Thursday 3 April 2014 08.45 BST The Queen will meet Pope Francis for the first time on Thursday in a private audience at the Vatican expected to lack the stiff formality of previous encounters between pontiffs and monarchs. As part of a day-long visit to Rome, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will be received by the 77-year-old pope on Thursday afternoon in a papal study rather than the lavish apostolic palace where Francis met Barack Obama last week. On this occasion, the Queen is not expected to wear black or a mantilla (lace veil). It will be the Queens first foreign trip since she went to Australia in 2011, and the first meeting between the supreme governor of the Church of England and the head of the Roman Catholic church since 2010, when emeritus pope Benedict XVI made a state visit to Britain. The Queen did not attend his Argentinian successors inauguration last March, and was instead represented by the Duke of Gloucester. But she has a long history of papal meetings, having made her first visit to the Vatican as Princess Elizabeth in 1951, where she was received by Pius XII, and presided over an unprecedented thaw in relations between the UK and Holy See. During her reign, the Queen has been received by a pope three times at the Vatican: by John XXIII in 1961, by John Paul II in 1980 and again in 2000. The first encounter with the Polish pope marked the first time a British monarch had made a state visit to the Vatican, a landmark gesture reciprocated two years later when the pontiff made a pastoral visit to the UK. The Queens meeting with Francis, therefore, will be her seventh with a leader of the worlds 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 08:07:13 +0000
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