Pope Leo meets first female Archbishop of Canterbury in Vatican

Pope Leo XIV received Sarah Mullally, the first woman to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury, in a private Vatican audience that ended with joint prayer in the Chapel of Urban VIII, a carefully staged encounter that signaled goodwill even as it exposed the limits of Anglican-Catholic reconciliation.

The meeting carried unusual weight because Mullally now leads the Anglican Communion, a global body of 42 provinces in more than 165 countries, while Leo heads the Catholic Church’s 1.4 billion faithful. Their exchange of gifts and shared prayer offered a visible sign that the two churches intend to keep talking, despite centuries of separation and unresolved disputes over authority, ministry and doctrine.

Mullally’s rise has already marked a turning point in the Church of England. She was confirmed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury on January 28, 2026, and installed at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25, 2026, making her the first woman to hold the office in its 1,400-year history. The Church of England traces that office back to Saint Augustine’s arrival in Kent from Rome in 597, a lineage that now intersects with a new and unmistakably different era.

Her visit to Rome was scheduled as a four-day pilgrimage from April 25 to 28, 2026, and her delegation included the Most Revd Richard Moth, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. The Vatican said Leo thanked Mullally for the Anglican Centre in Rome, which it said was established 60 years ago, and said he would commission Bishop Anthony Ball that evening as Mullally’s representative to the Holy See.

Leo used the meeting to press an ecumenical message that went beyond ceremony. He urged Catholics and Anglicans to proclaim Christ together and work to overcome differences, while greeting them with the peace of Eastertide. The encounter also fit a broader pattern in his early papacy, after an Africa tour that drew attention for his denunciations of despotism and war and a recent press conference in which he argued the church should focus more on justice and inequality than on sexual ethics.

Yet the meeting’s symbolism also had a hard edge. Catholic teaching remains clear that priestly ordination is not open to women, which means Mullally’s presence in the Apostolic Palace represented historic progress for one communion and a doctrinal limit for the other. The image of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury praying beside a pope captured both realities at once: a relationship that is still alive, and a divide that remains unsettled.