Pope Leo XIV and Sarah Mullally: When the Church Shows What She Does Not Teach
In an age where image precedes explanation, the Church’s public gestures carry theological weight. When those gestures appear to signal a unity not grounded in sacramental reality, they risk reshaping belief not by doctrine, but by perception.
The official account of the meeting between Pope Leo XIV and Sarah Mullally does not permit reduction to private courtesy. The Pope “prayed with her in the Urban VIII Chapel” and urged that Christians must “proclaim Christ to the world together,” adding that “we must… be constant in our prayers and efforts to remove any stumbling blocks that hinder the proclamation of the Gospel,” and that it would be a “scandal” not to continue working toward overcoming differences “no matter how intractable they may appear.”¹ These are not incidental pleasantries. They are programmatic claims about the relationship between mission, division, and unity.
The question, therefore, is not whether such encounters are permitted, but whether what is here enacted is what the Church in fact teaches. For the Church does not teach by text alone. She teaches by sign.
The Doctrinal Baseline: Ontology Before Courtesy
Catholic teaching on Anglican orders is not contested within the Church; it is settled. In Apostolicae Curae, Pope Leo XIII declared that Anglican ordinations are “absolutely null and utterly void.”² This is not a historical judgment but an ontological one. It concerns the validity of sacramental reality itself: no priesthood, no Eucharist, no apostolic succession in the Catholic sense.
That divergence is no longer merely one of defect but of contradiction. In Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the Church teaches that she “has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women,” and that this judgment “is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”³ The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith clarified that this teaching “has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”⁴ It is not under discernment; it is a limit rooted in the nature of the sacrament itself.
The Second Vatican Council reinforces this asymmetry. Lumen Gentium teaches that the Church of Christ “subsists in the Catholic Church,” governed by the successor of Peter and the bishops in communion with him.⁵ Unity, therefore, is not a gradient of interchangeable ministries but a concrete sacramental reality.
Ecumenism Properly Bounded
The Church’s commitment to ecumenism is real and binding. Unitatis Redintegratio affirms that “cooperation among Christians vividly expresses that bond which already unites them.”⁶ Yet the same decree warns that “nothing is so foreign to the spirit of ecumenism as a false irenicism.”⁷ This stands in continuity with Mortalium Animos, which insists that unity is achieved by “the return to the one true Church of Christ.”⁸ Engagement is therefore permitted, but only under conditions that preserve the truth about what unity is and what it is not.
It may be argued that such encounters serve evangelisation, that they witness to a common baptism, and that they respond to the scandal of division in a fragmented world. This argument has weight. It reflects the Lord’s prayer “that they may all be one” (Jn 17:21), and recognises real elements of shared faith. Yet it fails at a decisive point. It assumes that symbolic proximity can be expanded without doctrinal consequence, whereas Catholic teaching requires that sign and substance remain aligned. The problem is not the intention of unity, but the mode of its expression.
Compression of Meaning in Leo XIV’s Language
Leo XIV’s formulation—“we must not allow these continuing challenges to prevent us from… proclaiming Christ to the world together”¹—operates within the conciliar idiom. Yet it introduces a compression in which cooperation, communion, and sacramental unity are placed in such proximity that they risk being read as equivalent. When he adds that it would be a “scandal” not to work toward overcoming differences “no matter how intractable they may appear,”¹ the emphasis shifts toward process rather than resolution. The language is pastorally expansive but doctrinally under-specified.
From Text to Image: The Rise of Visual Theology
The difficulty intensifies when these words are embodied in visible form. The faithful encounter not a theological treatise but an image: the Pope and an “archbishop” standing together in a papal chapel, engaged in common prayer. The inference is immediate—shared spiritual authority. The doctrinal asymmetry remains in principle, but it is no longer visible in the sign.
The Church has always understood that her gestures teach. Lex orandi, lex credendi extends beyond formal liturgy into the broader symbolic life of the Church. When image and doctrine diverge, it is the image that forms perception.
The Tomb of St Peter: A Symbolic Threshold
The significance deepens when such encounters extend to the tomb of Saint Peter. This is not merely devotional space. It is the visible centre of apostolic succession and ecclesial unity. To permit gestures that resemble ecclesial leadership in that place—particularly by one presented as an “archbishop”—introduces a symbolic tension of the highest order. Even without formal liturgical action, the convergence of location, gesture, and public framing communicates participation in a reality that Catholic doctrine explicitly denies.
Not All Encounters Are Equal
It must be stated with precision that this encounter does not simply replicate a standard pattern of Vatican hospitality. Pope Leo XIV has engaged widely with non-Catholic leaders: with Orthodox hierarchs, with delegations of the World Council of Churches, and in interreligious contexts across multiple continents. Yet these engagements differ in form as well as content. Encounters with the Orthodox reflect a recognised proximity in sacramental theology and apostolic succession, and therefore admit of a degree of shared liturgical symbolism not applicable elsewhere. Meetings with Protestant or ecumenical delegations, by contrast, are typically institutional rather than personal, and avoid the staging of individualised symbolic parity in sacred settings. Even high-profile diplomatic encounters—such as those with figures like King Charles III—maintain a clear distinction between political representation and ecclesial identity. What distinguishes the present case is not merely the fact of engagement, but its symbolic density: a personal audience, shared prayer in a papal chapel, and the visual framing of an Anglican primate—moreover one whose ministry embodies a direct doctrinal contradiction—as functionally parallel within the most charged spaces of Catholic ecclesial life.
Internal Pressure and External Signification
These gestures occur within a charged ecclesial environment. In parts of Europe, figures such as Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich and Cardinal Reinhard Marx have entertained discussions that treat the question of women’s ordination as pastorally open. While Rome has not altered doctrine, neither has it reasserted it with the clarity and frequency that characterised earlier periods. The result is a widening gap between formal teaching and practical perception. In such a context, symbolic acts become interpretive anchors.
Containment Without Clarity
The present approach may be described as a form of containment: doctrine remains fixed, dialogue is expanded, symbolism is broadened. Such a strategy seeks to preserve unity while avoiding rupture. Yet containment depends upon clarity. Without it, the boundaries of doctrine become perceptually porous. What is defined as impossible begins to appear merely improbable, and what is definitive begins to seem provisional.
The Governing Principle
The theological issue can be stated with precision: pastoral action must not communicate what doctrine denies. When gesture, image, and context suggest a unity that does not exist, the Church risks a semiotic incoherence in which her visible life no longer transparently expresses her doctrinal identity.
Conclusion: The Difference Between Encounter and Equivalence
The difficulty exposed by this encounter is not ecumenism itself, but the manner in which it is presently signified. The Church is neither required to withdraw from dialogue nor to reduce other Christians to the status of secular interlocutors. The teaching of the Second Vatican Council remains clear: there exists a real, though imperfect, communion. Yet that same teaching presumes—and depends upon—the visible preservation of doctrinal asymmetry.
A more coherent approach would not have required rupture, but restraint. It would have ensured that shared encounters did not take place in a manner resembling liturgical action, nor in settings that communicate sacramental unity. It would have avoided the staging of prayer within the most symbolically charged spaces of Catholic identity. It would have exercised discipline in public representation so that imagery did not present functional equivalence between Catholic bishops and those whose ministries the Church does not recognise as sacramentally valid.
Above all, it would have been accompanied by explicit doctrinal articulation: that the ordination of women is not possible within the Catholic Church, that this judgment has been definitively taught in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, and that developments within Anglicanism in this regard represent not merely a divergence, but a deepened obstacle to unity.
None of this would have constituted hostility. It would have constituted honesty. For ecumenism cannot be built upon gestures that obscure the very differences that must be resolved. Nor can unity be advanced by images that suggest a convergence which does not yet exist. The Church is not called to simulate unity, but to witness to it truthfully, even in its absence.
The present difficulty, therefore, is not that the Church has said too little, but that she has shown too much without sufficient qualification. In an age where image precedes explanation, this imbalance is not neutral. It forms perception, and perception shapes belief.
For the Church does not lose her doctrine first by contradicting it, but by permitting it to be visibly obscured.
¹ Vatican News, “Pope Leo XIV meets Archbishop of Canterbury…,” April 2026.
² Apostolicae Curae, §36.
³ Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, §4.
⁴ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Responsum ad dubium (1995).
⁵ Lumen Gentium, §8.
⁶ Unitatis Redintegratio, §12.
⁷ Ibid., §11.
⁸ Mortalium Animos, §10.
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