Pope Benedict xvi and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will pray together on March 10, the first time the leaders of the two churches will have done so since 1996. The two will hold evening prayers at a monastery near the Coliseum in Rome.

A stone cross from Canterbury will be erected in the church. The monastery is the same one from which Pope Gregory sent out monks to convert Britain to Catholicism in the sixth century.

The choir of Westminster Abbey and the choir of the Sistine Chapel will perform together twice in late June. One of the performances will be in the Sistine Chapel. They will also perform a concert in Westminster Cathedral in May. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the prayer and the performances are “a sign of moving together along the same path.”

This will be the first time that the over-500-year-old Sistine Chapel Choir will have performed with another choral group.

Benedict and Williams have not prayed together before, but Pope John Paul ii held prayers with both of Williams’s predecessors: Robert Runcie and George Carey.

These events reveal the Catholic and Anglican churches moving closer together, despite the Catholic Church’s attempts to poach members from the Anglican Church—just as the Trumpet has long forecast.