“This historic event will help renew the link between the monarchy and Catholicism which was broken at the Reformation,” said Timothy Guile, chairman of the English Catholic History Association. Her funeral Mass, led by Cardinal Vincent Nichols, chairman of the bishops’ conference of England and Wales, included typically Catholic prayers, read by her grandchildren, for the pope and deceased friends and relatives. Two previous kings, James I and Charles I, had foreign-born Catholic consorts, while King Charles II (1630-1685) became a Catholic on his deathbed. “Catholics have made a huge historical contribution here — they’re as patriotically British as anyone else,” the Catholic History Association chairman told OSV News. Britain’s Catholic weekly, The Tablet, said the king’s first formal attendance at a Catholic Mass in Britain marked “one of the most significant moments in recent Catholic history.”