The Pope and the Archbishop LONDON - Since the remarkable coincidence of their inaugurations just days apart, there has seemed no doubt that Pope Francis and the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, would bring a new tone, language and imagery to the long years of schism dividing their churches since Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 16th century. At their first encounter at the Vatican on Friday, indeed, their words seemed friendly and hopeful enough. "Since we began our respective ministries within days of each other," the pope told the archbishop, "I think we will always have a particular reason to support one another in prayer." But their public silence on their myriad doctrinal differences seemed to offer a gloomier omen for Christian unity between a hierarchical Roman Catholic Church claiming 1.2 billion faithful, and the much smaller Anglican Communion of which Archbishop Welby is the spiritual leader. Pope Francis, 76, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, held his inaugural Mass as the 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church on March 19, two days before Archbishop Welby, 57, was enthroned as the 105th archbishop of Canterbury. And, for those seeking ecumenical signals, both men have tilted against economic injustice, while Archbishop Welby has joined with Vincent Nichols, archbishop of Westminster and head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, to call for an end to the war in Syria. From another perspective, though, the contrasting choreographies of the two inaugurations offered a remarkable tableau of their differences, the pope flanked by the sober ranks of his all-male cardinals - perhaps the answer to Stalin's famed question: how many divisions has the pope? - while Archbishop Welby chose a preponderance of female priests and drummers from Africa, where Anglicanism has recorded the strongest growth among its 80 million followers. Personal affinity, in other words, is hardly likely to trump dogma on such central issues as women's place in the priesthood and the ordination as bishops of celibate gay men in civil partnerships - notions rejected by the Vatican and approved by the Church of England. In London, moreover, senior church officials are pressing for decisive steps to approve the consecration of women as Anglican bishops, a step supported passionately by Archbishop Welby but anathema to Roman Catholic doctrine. In the public remarks surrounding the encounter at the Vatican, "there was no mention whatever of women bishops in the Anglican Communion," wrote Alexander Lucie-Smith, a Catholic priest and moral theologian. Presumably the reason for this is because the matter is simply not worth discussing and can be relegated to the realm of things we must simply agree to disagree on. Indeed, some Catholic commentators remained profoundly suspicious of ecumenical dialogue simply because, as the Catholic writer and broadcaster William Oddie put it, "the impression is being given that in some way the pope and the archbishop are equivalent figures, and that Welby's beliefs about his church and his office are understood and recognized by the Holy See." The differences between the two churches extend to the most basic notions of how they function, setting the Vatican's tradition of monolithic global reach against Anglican divisions among its followers in Africa, Britain and the United States. "Welby has already resigned himself to the fact that the important-sounding Anglican Communion is not a church like the Roman Catholic - and cannot become one - but a federation whose strength lies in links between parishes and bishops," the columnist and author Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian. For all that, there is some prospect that the pope and the archbishop may feel more at ease with one another than their predecessors, whose relationship chilled when Benedict XVI devised a canonical stratagem to lure dissident Anglicans from the Church of England, then led by the Most Rev. Rowan Williams. There is some common ground. Both men face a crisis of Christian belief in the materialist West. Both oppose same-sex marriage, although the language they bring to the question of homosexuality seems to signal a profound divergence. While the archbishop has spoken of "gay relationships that are just stunning" in their quality, the pope, confronting huge sexual abuse and corruption scandals clinging to the Vatican, has spoken darkly of a "gay lobby" vying for power and influence within the Curia, his church's secretive hierarchy. Some analysts see similarities in their paths to primacy. "Welby and Francis came to their jobs as outsiders," Mr. Brown wrote in The Guardian: The pope is the first Jesuit pontiff, while Archbishop Welby, a former oil executive, was associated with a charismatic evangelical organization within the Church of England. Most fundamentally, their churches share a scriptural narrative, even though the conclusions they draw from it seem irreconcilable, down to the most basic clerical ways. When he visited the Vatican, for instance, Archbishop Welby was accompanied by his wife, Caroline. But his interlocutors were from of a world of single men whose vaunted celibacy defines the very essence of their priesthood.