The two oldest and most resilient institutions in the world are the papacy and the British monarchy. Both are under intense international scrutiny at present, but on the evidence of last week, neither of them is in decline.

Two great media spectacles of the last few days, the papal funeral and royal wedding, have shown how these ancient monarchies are capable of adapting to the modern world without abandoning the continuity that gives them their raison d’etre.

You may doubt the truth of this contention in both cases. Some Americans will have noticed that Vatican protocol placed President and Mrs. Bush in the second row of heads of state, behind obscure figures such as the grand master of the Knights of Malta. While the president is too big a man to take offense, it is tempting to conclude that, like any other court, the Roman curia loves precedence and precedents, but is lacking in common sense.

Similarly, those who watched the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles might be forgiven for wondering why the queen chose to absent herself from the civil marriage ceremony, but was happy to attend the blessing by the Archbishop of Canterbury afterward at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. Did a deep psychodrama underlie this apparent withholding of maternal approval? Or was the queen just being snobbish?

The answer is that both the Vatican and the British monarchy have good reasons for preserving their apparently eccentric ways. The fact that the most powerful man in the world was shown no special favor among the 200 heads of state or government at the funeral signifies that all men and women, however mighty, are equal in the sight of God – and his vicar on earth.

Even posthumously, this saintly pope was still worldly enough to know just how to gain the respect of a man like President Bush.

As for the queen: Well, if she had decided to miss her eldest son’s wedding merely for the sake of some unfinished Oedipal business, she would not be the most experienced head of state on the world stage, and the wisest, which, by common consent, she is. Neither is she a snob. She couldn’t be an Englishwoman of her age or class if she did not prefer the company of heads of state and the grandeur of the service in her chapel at Windsor to the humdrum bureaucratic formalities of a marriage at city hall. But she puts up with much drearier occasions almost every day of her life in the course of her charitable work.

No, her reason for attending only the religious rather than the civil ceremony had nothing to do with social or aesthetic matters. The queen is a spiritual as well as a temporal leader. She is supreme governor of the Church of England, and she takes that part of her duties with supreme seriousness.

For all those who belong in the Judeo-Christian tradition, matrimony is holy as well as practical, requiring solemn vows. Though the Anglican and Episcopalian Churches allow some latitude about the remarriage of divorced people, Charles and Camilla didn’t qualify for a wedding in church. The rules couldn’t be altered or bent for the heir to the throne, who is supposed to set an example.

For the same reason, the queen couldn’t attend the civil ceremony without thereby condoning, as supreme governor of the church, the secular view of marriage. By blessing the union of Charles and Camilla in the presence of the queen, the Anglican Church was careful not to imply that marriage in church – what Catholics and many other Christians would call the sacrament of matrimony – is merely an option. It isn’t. But if the queen had appeared, with all the majesty of her office, at city hall to witness a civil marriage ceremony from which God is deliberately excluded, then the signal she would have sent – about marriage, religion, and the monarchy – would at the very least have been ambiguous.

The queen’s way of handling the iconography of this wedding – which, on the day, preserved her dignity while seeming entirely natural – demonstrates that the monarchy is still rooted in the Judeo-Christian biblical past. The ancient kings of Israel were sacerdotal figures, too, and the sacral kingship of the Middle Ages still lingers: not only in the office of supreme governor but in the consecration of every new sovereign at his or her coronation.

All this may seem remote from a republic with strict separation of church and state. I remember an eminent Washington columnist, whose opinion I revere on almost all subjects, asking me why on earth the British stuck with the monarchy, which seemed to him so much more primitive than the American presidency. I didn’t dare point out that the British had actually tried abolishing the monarchy, but disliked the result so much that after a few years they were even prepared to reinstate that worthless clan, the house of Stuart.

The American presidency is, as is often observed, a secularized monarchy. But it derives much of its aura from the deeply religious cast of American public life. The president – like all presidents – invokes God far more often than any British politician. Informally, the presidency is legitimized by divine authority. Though it is not as old as the papacy and the British monarchy – which are recognizable in their present form already in the Dark Ages, with Pope Gregory the Great and King Alfred the Great – the American presidency is no less successful. The lesson for nation-building seems to be: If you want political institutions to endure, do not leave God out of the equation.