Given the close relationship between the King and Francis, some may have been asking why Charles wasn’t in the Vatican earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Instead, he delegated attendance to Prince William for the late pontiff’s funeral in April.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Royal officials did not explicitly give a reason, but experts suggest this may be a combination of historical considerations – being mindful of the split between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church (see our 10:15 post) – and deferring to what the late Queen Elizabeth II did.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“This is the country that broke from Rome, there is that historical split,” said George Gross, a royal historian at King’s College London.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s that classic British fusion of historical precedent, which becomes a tradition.”<\/p>\n
Elizabeth II did not attend many funerals, including Pope John Paul II’s in 2005, when she sent her son Charles, then Prince of Wales, in her place.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The Queen didn’t go to funerals abroad as far as I remember,” said Gross.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“That is the background to it. And more recently, they’re obviously balancing [Charles’] diary and health issues as well,” he added, referring to the King’s recovery from cancer.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Given the close relationship between the King and Francis, some may have been asking why Charles wasn’t in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-140253","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}