King to meet Pope Francis during state visit to Italy

This will be the King’s third meeting with Pope Francis and his first since acceding the throne in September 2022.

The King will meet Pope Francis at the Vatican during a visit to Italy in early April.

Buckingham Palace announced on Friday that the King and Queen will make state visits to Italy and the Holy See “in early April 2025”.  The announcement said they will join the Pope “in celebrating the 2025 Jubilee Year … a year of walking together as ‘pilgrims of hope’”.

The Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols welcomed the announcement. “I am delighted King Charles and Queen Camilla will visit the Holy See and meet with Pope Francis during this special Jubilee Year when so many will gather in Rome as pilgrims of hope,” he said. “It presents a wonderful opportunity for us to celebrate the close relationship between the UK and the Holy See.”

This will be the King’s third meeting with Pope Francis and his first since acceding the throne on the death of his mother in September 2022. It will be the Pope’s second meeting with a British monarch, following his meeting with the late Queen at the Vatican in 2014.

The late Queen and her husband Prince Philip visited Rome during the last ordinary Jubilee in 2000 for a private meeting with Pope John Paul II.

The King’s most recent visit to Rome was in 2019, to attend the canonisation of John Henry Newman. In an article published for the occasion in The Tablet, he praised Newman for his ability to “see differences as places of encounter rather than exclusion”, observing: “Harmony requires difference.”

In a meeting with Pope Francis during that visit, he wished him “great success in your battle for the environment”. 

In March last year Jennifer Jordan-Saifi, the chief executive of the Sustainable Markets Initiative founded by the then-Prince of Wales in 2020, told Vatican News that “the Pope has a very similar vision to His Majesty the King in terms of climate and biodiversity”. 

She said the priorities of the Terra Carta, the 2021 “guiding document” for the Sustainable Markets Initiative, were “very much aligned” with the encyclical Laudato Si’, a copy of which the Pope gave to Charles during another visit to Rome in 2017.

The King and Queen’s visits are expected to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of their wedding in 2005, on 9 April – which was itself postponed by the death of Pope John Paul II requiring Charles to attend his funeral in Rome.

They were to host an Italian-themed dinner at their Highgrove estate on Friday evening to confirm the visits, attended by the Italian ambassador to the United Kingdom Inigo Lambertini and the Italian-American actor Stanley Tucci, who played the papabile Cardinal Aldo Bellini in the 2024 film Conclave.

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