CNA Staff, Jul 21, 2020 / 04:52 pm (CNA).- Bishop Barry Knestout of Richmond, Virginia celebrated the 200th anniversary of the diocese with a call to reflect on grace in moments of hardship.
“For our bicentennial, we ask God to grace us with a new birth, a new springtime for all the faithful here in the Diocese of Richmond,” the bishop said in a recent homily.
“As we celebrate 200 years as a diocese amid a crisis and pandemic, we are reminded as bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated, the entire people of God that we are called to be a people always centered on Christ.”
Knestout celebrated Mass at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart July 11. The Mass included the ordination of two priests: Anthony Ferguson for the Diocese of Richmond, and Julio Reyes for the Diocese of Zacatecoluca, El Salvador.
The ordinations had been postponed from an earlier date due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Due to ongoing state restrictions limiting church gatherings to 50% of building capacity, the Mass was attended by 230 people, including 44 priests, according to The Catholic Virginian.
During the Mass, the cathedral displayed the relics of St. Vincent de Paul, St. John Neumann, and St. Katharine Drexel. It also displayed a replica of the apostolic brief, a formal papal letter founding the Diocese of Richmond.
In his homily, Knestout reflected on the various hardships the Catholic community in Virginia has faced over the past 200 years, including shortages of priests, insufficient resources, racism and bigotry, and epidemics such as Yellow Fever in 1820 and the Spanish Flu in 1919.
These challenges are similar to those facing people today, he continued, and Catholics in the diocese now can take heart in the faithfulness of God.
“In good times or bad, God has never abandoned us,” the bishop said. “Moved by this conviction, Catholics respond to the needs around us by making sacrifices for the sake of the Church, for the poor and for the common good by seeking ways to alleviate the pain of others.”
The bishop encouraged those present, especially the newly ordained ministers, to focus not on themselves but on evangelization and service to those who are vulnerable.
“As we grapple with the [coronavirus] pandemic and political and cultural turmoil, we are strengthened to serve others and give witness to our faith,” he said.
As Christians, Knestout said, we are called “to seek our center not in any idea, any ideology, any movement, any activity, any club, any association, any tribe, any nation – not to find our center there but to find and hold our center in Christ.”
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A Vatican flag, with the incorrect design likely drawn from Wikipedia, and the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. / Bohumil Petrik/ACI
St. Louis, Mo., Apr 8, 2023 / 13:00 pm (CNA).
The flag of Vatican City, with its distinctive yellow and white, is instantly recognizable to many Catholics. Likely far fewer people, though, have scrutinized the papal coat of arms on the right-hand side, instead taking the intricate design — which includes famous crossed keys — for granted.
As it turns out, there’s a good chance that the coats of arms on many of the Vatican flags you’ve seen out in the world are rendered incorrectly. And it took until 2023 for the internet to start taking notice.
Imagine you wanted to print your own version of the Vatican flag. Where would you go to find a high-quality picture of one? If you’re like most internet users, your first stop would probably not be the Vatican’s official (but admittedly outdated) vatican.va website. You’re probably going to pull up Wikipedia, one of the world’s most visited websites and an endless storehouse of free image content. Flagmakers the world over appear to have done so over the years.
Imagine many people’s surprise, then, to discover that the image of the “Flag of Vatican City” displayed on Wikipedia has been wrong several times over the years, most recently from 2017 to 2022. (It was also wrong from 2006–2007.)
What is “wrong” about these flags, you might ask? It’s a small detail in the grand scheme of things but easy to spot once you know about it. The erroneous Wikipedia file includes a red disk at the bottom of the papal tiara as well as a different shade of yellow on portions of the coat of arms.
The anonymous Wikipedia editor who changed the look of the flag in 2017 wrote that he or she did so for “color correction” purposes, noting that the Vatican’s coat of arms includes the red at the bottom of the tiara. The only problem? The Vatican’s official flag design renders the coat of arms differently, with the circular bottom of the tiara in white.
The image was reverted to the correct one in 2022, but the damage was done. A casual internet search will turn up dozens of Vatican flags for sale that clearly used the incorrect image downloaded from Wikipedia. The incorrect flag has even made its way into emojis. (This whole situation gained attention last month after a Reddit user made a post about it.)
An inexpensive Vatican flag available for sale on Amazon that makes use of the incorrect Wikipedia flag design. Amazon/Screenshot
Father William Becker, pastor at St. Columbanus Parish in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, read the Reddit post with interest and amusement. Becker, a self-described “flag guy,” has studied the Vatican flag for years and even wrote an entire book about it. He has fond memories of raising the yellow and white colors over his alma mater, the North American College in Rome.
Becker told CNA that the saga of the Vatican flag on Wikipedia demonstrates a need for the Vatican to step in and clarify exactly what its flag should look like, especially considering the fact that Catholic churches all over the world display the Vatican flag.
It was precisely this lack of clarity on the official design of the Vatican flag that led Becker to create a website detailing, as best as he could, the correct design for the flag.
“Cultural communities in general have turned to flags in a stunning way,” Becker commented, citing in part a proliferation of cheaply made, mass-produced flags. And, anecdotally, there seems to be an ever-increasing interest in the Vatican flag as a way for Catholics to claim an identity, whether by flying a flag at home, waving it at a papal event, or by putting one in their social media profile picture.
The Vatican flag. Bohumil Petrik/CNA
Perhaps surprisingly, the Vatican flag is less than 100 years old, as is Vatican City itself. For more than a millennium before 1870, the pope ruled over the Papal States, large regions mainly within present-day Italy. After the Vatican lost control of the Papal States, it found itself a tiny island surrounded by an acrimonious Italy. It took nearly 60 years until the ratification of the Lateran Accords of 1929 ushered in harmony between the Vatican and Italy, and the creation of the world’s smallest sovereign country.
In the days of the Papal States, many different flags were used, but the yellow and white color scheme was a common feature. Becker said the modern design was first used by the merchant fleet in the Papal States from 1825 to 1870. In 1929, that design was chosen as the new flag of Vatican City, the sovereign country.
“It took a while in 1929 to get some flags made. The techniques of mass production weren’t available yet, and so it would have been a matter of sewing up some flags and fitting out buildings with flag staffs,” Becker noted, saying that during this time and for years afterward there was quite a bit of variation between the Vatican flags people flew, perhaps even more so than today.
“That’s kind of common with other countries too, especially those that don’t really take pains to standardize their design. [Nowadays] a flagmaker is likely to go to a source like Wikipedia, and it may vary in its accuracy,” Becker told CNA.
The same flag chosen in 1929 was reconfirmed in a revised Vatican constitution, issued by Pope John Paul II in 2000. The original Vatican flag was actually square, as indeed the official version is today. Since roughly the 1960s, though, buildings began to fly oblong state flags that followed Italy’s flag proportions, probably because most Vatican flags at the time were mass-produced there.
The flag has special significance beyond the walls of Vatican City as a marker for the Vatican’s extraterritorial properties, of which there are more than a dozen. These properties, which include major basilicas such as St. Paul Outside the Walls and St. Mary Major, are marked as the Vatican’s through their flying of the papal flag.
Becker said he hopes his website will serve as a helpful resource for anyone looking for the exact Vatican flag design, at least until the Vatican issues some kind of clarification on what exactly the flag should look like.
“The papal flag is interesting because on the one hand, the Vatican is such a small state, but the papal flag is seen all over the world. Anywhere there’s a Catholic church, you might be likely to run into a papal flag,” he said.
“It would be nice if somebody at the Holy See could, through their website or wherever, make some design specifications more available … design specifications that manufacturers could rely on a bit more.”
Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of Word on Fire, a media apostolate focused on evangelization. / Credit: Word on Fire
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 3, 2025 / 16:15 pm (CNA).
Word on Fire Founder Bishop Robert Barron will attend President D… […]
2 Comments
His Excellency did not mention a pressing and current challenge – one that has faced him since his appointment. Its absence from his litany implies that it’s not a high priority for him, which is telling, and troubling.
Virginia’s Catholic Senator Tim Kaine lives in Richmond. He is 100% pro-abortion, yet has never been publicly corrected, much less canonically penalized. This scandal is compounded when Kaine’s pastor gives him a standing ovation, and even more when Kaine touts his Catholic Faith without a murmur of discontent from the chancery.
The reason for the silence, the hesitation to act? It might lie in the fact that Virginia’s Blackface Attorney General Mark Herring, a close ally of Kaine, has in his hands the files of every priest in +Knestout’s diocese. Could one false move (so to speak, since of course we mean a *correct* action taken) on the part of the bishop bring down upon him the sword now dangling over his head?
That is a story in itself, and it should be written and published in this fine journal.
“His Excellency” Lord Knestout is a “McCarrick-Establishment-clericalist-fraud.”
His persecution of Fr. Mark White is utterly repulsive and evil.
But what should we expect of the former secretary to the sociopath-sex-abuser-fraud McCarrick, who personally “groomed” Knestout to make him what he is: a servant of the ZEITGEST.
His Excellency did not mention a pressing and current challenge – one that has faced him since his appointment. Its absence from his litany implies that it’s not a high priority for him, which is telling, and troubling.
Virginia’s Catholic Senator Tim Kaine lives in Richmond. He is 100% pro-abortion, yet has never been publicly corrected, much less canonically penalized. This scandal is compounded when Kaine’s pastor gives him a standing ovation, and even more when Kaine touts his Catholic Faith without a murmur of discontent from the chancery.
The reason for the silence, the hesitation to act? It might lie in the fact that Virginia’s Blackface Attorney General Mark Herring, a close ally of Kaine, has in his hands the files of every priest in +Knestout’s diocese. Could one false move (so to speak, since of course we mean a *correct* action taken) on the part of the bishop bring down upon him the sword now dangling over his head?
That is a story in itself, and it should be written and published in this fine journal.
“His Excellency” Lord Knestout is a “McCarrick-Establishment-clericalist-fraud.”
His persecution of Fr. Mark White is utterly repulsive and evil.
But what should we expect of the former secretary to the sociopath-sex-abuser-fraud McCarrick, who personally “groomed” Knestout to make him what he is: a servant of the ZEITGEST.