Why has the Pope not visited us?

It will be a novel experience seeing the Pope in the United Kingdom thanks to our turbulent history with the leader of the Catholic Church.

There have only ever been two papal visits to this country.

There was the Oxford educated antipope Alexander V in the 1300s and Pope John Paul II visited in May 1982.

It is now thought that the current Pope Benedict XVI will make a state visit next year and he could even be paying a visit to Oxford on his trip.

Why has the pontiff been so reticent to visit?

His absence from these shores for much of the last 500 years can in large part be explained by the long-running conflict set in motion by Henry VIII, the English king that instigated the spilt between the Church of England and the Church in Rome.

When he came to the throne Henry was a devout Catholic but by the end of his reign he had dismissed the Pope's authority over the church and set himself up as the spiritual as well as temporal ruler of his kingdom.

Oxford historian Suzannah Lipscomb is currently working at Hampton Court Palace where she is part of the team reinterpreting the Tudor palace to mark Henry's accession to the throne.

When explaining why Henry chose to make the split she said: "It happened for a number of reasons, the most famous one of course was that Henry wanted to marry Anne Boleyn."

Henry VIII caused the Church of England/Roman Catholic Church split

But there were other reasons why Henry wanted to part from the church as controlled by The Pope. "Its also because he had become convinced that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been wrong in the eyes of God, according to God's law, and that the previous Pope who'd allowed him to marry his brother's widow had been absolutely wrong in allowing him to do that."

The Pope excommunicated Henry and England faced the threat of military action for the rest of Henry's rule.

Although Henry split the country from the Catholic Church he wasn't entirely responsible for turning the nation into a protestant county as Lipscomb explains: "He always considered himself to be a Catholic until the end of his life. Not a Roman Catholic mind you but a Catholic none the less."

Henry's heir, his son Edward, was a protestant ruler. However, when he died at age 15 his sister Mary attached England to Rome once again before her sister Elizabeth I broke with the Catholic Church again, resulting in the attack by the Spanish Armada.

In recent history the mood has mellowed somewhat and this visit might even coincide with the beatification of Cardinal Newman, one of the founding members of the Oxford Movement.