BETWEEN RELIGION AND BORDERS: CHARLES III, THE VATICAN, AND A MONARCHY ON THE BRINK The visit of King Charles III to the Vatican, presented as an act of religious reconciliation, is in fact much more than that. The prayer with Pope Leo XIV in the Sistine Chapel—the first between a British monarch and a pontiff after five centuries of mistrust and hostility—marked the culmination of a strategy planned with surgical precision, designed to address a twofold fragility: the geopolitical weakness of a post-Brexit United Kingdom and the institutional vulnerability of a monarchy shaken by scandals and forced to reinvent itself in a post-imperial and post-sacral age. It is the gesture of a sovereign striving to restore meaning to his role, in order to spare the British crown the fate that befell the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, the Savoys, and the many dynasties that, unable or unwilling to adapt to their time, vanished from the stage of history. The end of monarchy is almost always i...