Pope Leo XIV prayed with Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally inside the Vatican's Pauline Chapel on Wednesday — the first time a Roman pontiff has prayed with an Anglican primate since the 1500s break that produced the Church of England. [1] The paper's account of the Regina Caeli silence on death-penalty doctrine entered Day Three on April 26; Wednesday's prayer extends the same religion-power-wartime ledger the paper has watched. The Vance answer the USCCB asked for is now fifteen days late.

The two events are the same news. The Mullally encounter is the ecumenical work the new pontificate has chosen to make public. The death-penalty silence is the political work it has not. A pope who will pray with the spiritual descendants of the English Reformation has not produced a sentence on the Vance-USCCB exchange about Catholic teaching on capital punishment under a Catholic vice president whose office has expanded the federal death-penalty caseload. [2] The first datum and the second datum belong on the same calendar.

What the joint prayer supplied was content: Leo XIV's homily named "shared Christian witness" and "the unity for which Christ prayed" as the work of the next phase of the relationship. [1] What the Vance silence has not supplied is the same kind of content for the part of the religion-power-wartime thread the paper has documented. A homily is on the record. A pastoral letter is not. The asymmetry is the news.

The Catholic press has begun to phrase the question more directly: a USCCB official told America Magazine this week that the bishops "expect engagement, not silence" from the Vatican on issues where American Catholics have asked for clarity. [3] The Mullally embrace shows the speed at which Leo XIV can move when he chooses. Day fifteen of the death-penalty silence shows the speed at which he is choosing not to.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin