From te London Guardian-Prince Charles's meeting today with Pope Benedict XVI is a curious snapshot of the progress that women have made in the last 500 years. The most interesting detail here was not visible in the photographs, but mentioned in all the copy: it was the veil that the Duchess of Cornwall had to wear to meet the pope. Protocol demands it. The pope might now condescend to meet a couple married to each other only because their adulteries put an end to their previous marriages, but a woman received by him formally must still wear a token covering over her head and face.
The first divorce in the history of the Church of England could not be accounted a victory for the equal treatment of women. After he married Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII only left one of his discarded wives alive – Anne of Cleves. All the others who displeased him were not divorced but killed. Charles, his 14th great-grandson, treated his ex much better, if not entirely of his own free will – his better instincts had a lot of help from her divorce lawyers.
But Charles is also in the religion business, as the prospective Defender of Faith and supreme governor of the Church of England, and when he met the pope, there must have been some residual sense that they were both concerned with global forms of Christianity. In the pope's case this is actually true. The Catholic church is still a coherent global entity. The Anglican communion is not. Some of the reasons for this are political, in the sense that the Church of England only looked like a global phenomenon when England and her empire was one too.
More here-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/apr/27/charles-camilla-pope-benedict
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