Catholics and Anglicans prepare ecumenical burial fit for a king

c. 2015 Religion News Service

CANTERBURY, England (RNS) Tens of thousands of people in Leicester—England’s most religiously diverse city—are getting ready to honor the memory of a long-despised English king with a ceremony that testifies to the already warm relationship between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.

The bones of King Richard III—who was slain in battle in 1485 and vilified in the writings of William Shakespeare, who described him as a “poisonous bunch-back’d toad”—will be interred at Leicester Cathedralon Thursday at a ceremony led by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and attended by leading Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews, as well as members of England’s royal family.