From the Netflix documentary series, "Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi" / Netflix
Rome Newsroom, Apr 11, 2023 / 10:15 am (CNA).
The chief prosecutor of the Vatican City State court met Tuesday with the brother of Em… […]
Pope Francis delivered a brief message before reciting the Regina Caeli prayer on Easter Monday, April 10, 2023. / Vatican Media
Vatican City, Apr 10, 2023 / 05:50 am (CNA).
Pope Francis encouraged Christians to not be held back by fear of judg… […]
null / Pablo Esparza/CNA
Vatican City, Apr 9, 2023 / 04:45 am (CNA).
On the morning of Easter Sunday 2023, Pope Francis presided over Mass in St. Peter’s Square before delivering his Urbi et Orbi message and blessing from the central loggia of … […]
null / Pablo Esparza/CNA
Vatican City, Apr 9, 2023 / 04:30 am (CNA).
Pope Francis presided over Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday 2023, before giving the traditional Urbi et Orbi blessing in the presence of around 100,000 people.On a … […]
Pope Francis gives his homily at the Easter Vigil Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on April 8, 2023. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Vatican City, Apr 8, 2023 / 13:40 pm (CNA).
At the Vatican’s Easter Vigil Mass, Pope Francis urged people to “roll away the stones of sin and fear” to experience the power of Christ’s resurrection.
In his Easter homily on April 8, the pope issued an invitation to “rediscover the grace of God’s resurrection within you!”
“Today, brothers and sisters, the power of Easter summons you to roll away every stone of disappointment and mistrust. The Lord is an expert in rolling back the stones of sin and fear … return to Him,” he said in St. Peter’s Basilica.
“Look with confidence to the future,” he said. “For Christ is risen and has changed the direction of history.”
The Easter Vigil, which takes place on Holy Saturday night, “is the greatest and most noble of all solemnities,” according to the Roman Missal.
The liturgy began in darkness with the blessing of the new fire and the preparation of the Paschal Candle. The candle symbolizes the light of Christ, which “shines in the darkness” that “has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Pope Francis arrived at the basilica in a wheelchair dressed in white and gold vestments. He presided over the vigil Mass from a white chair placed at the side of the main altar in the presence of 8,000 people.
Forty cardinals, 25 bishops, and about 200 priests processed through the dark church carrying lit candles to signify the light of Christ coming to dispel the darkness.
At the beginning of the liturgy, a cantor sang the Exsultet Easter Proclamation, which tells the story of salvation from the creation, the testing and fall of Adam, the liberation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, and culminates in Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and leads us to salvation.
The basilica was lit up gradually until it was fully illuminated at the Gloria, when the bells of St. Peter’s tolled.
In his homily, Pope Francis asked people to remember the place where they came to know Jesus personally and to interiorly “return to that first encounter.”
“Remember that powerful experience of the Holy Spirit; that great joy of forgiveness experienced after that one confession; that intense and unforgettable moment of prayer; that light that was kindled within you and changed your life; that encounter, that pilgrimage,” he said.
“Each of us knows the place of his or her interior resurrection, that beginning and foundation, the place where things changed. We cannot leave this in the past; the Risen Lord invites us to return there to celebrate Easter.”
During the Easter Vigil Mass, Pope Francis baptized eight people from the United States of America, Nigeria, Albania, Italy, and Venezuela.
The congregation prayed the Litany of the Saints and renewed their baptismal promises as the candidates prepared to be received fully into the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis recalled the sorrow that the disciples must have experienced when Jesus’ tomb was sealed with a stone. He noted that there are also “sealed tombs” in the present, like the “tombs of disappointment, bitterness and distrust, of the dismay of thinking that ‘nothing more can be done,’ ‘things will never change,’ ‘better to live for today,’ since ‘there is no certainty about tomorrow.’”
“At times, we may simply feel weary about our daily routine, tired of taking risks in a cold, hard world where only the clever and the strong seem to get ahead,” he said.
“At other times, we may feel helpless and discouraged before the power of evil, the conflicts that tear relationships apart, the attitudes of calculation and indifference that seem to prevail in society, the cancer of corruption– there’s a lot –the spread of injustice, the icy winds of war.”
In these moments of discouragement, Christ’s resurrection “motivates us to move forward,” he said, “and to leave behind our sense of defeat, to roll away the stone of the tombs in which we often imprison our hope.”
“Dear brothers and sisters, let us follow Jesus to Galilee, encounter him and worship him there, where he is waiting for each of us. Let us revive the beauty of that moment when we realized that he is alive and we made him the Lord of our lives. … Let us rise to new life!” the pope said.
Pope Francis is also scheduled to preside over Mass on Easter Sunday morning in St. Peter’s Square, after which he will give the traditional “Urbi et Orbi” blessing.
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.)
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.
One might imagine that the precise design specifications of the Vatican flag would be laid out for anyone to access, like they are for the flag of the United States, for example. But they aren’t. The best the Vatican provides is a web page with a verbal description and history of the flag, along with a low-resolution image showing a square version.
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.
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.”
The Liturgy of the Passion of the Lord in St. Peter’s Basilica on April 7, 2023. / Daniel Ibanez/CNA
Vatican City, Apr 7, 2023 / 12:30 pm (CNA).
On Good Friday, Pope Francis presided over the Liturgy of the Passion of the Lord in St. Peter’s Ba… […]
Pope Francis kisses the crucifix at the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion in St. Peter’s Basilica on April 7, 2023. / Vatican Media
Vatican City, Apr 7, 2023 / 12:00 pm (CNA).
At the Vatican’s Good Friday liturgy, the papal preacher warned against the danger of believers being drawn into the “vortex of nihilism” by the post-modern world’s “total relativism.”
Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap., compared Friedrich Nietzsche’s words “God is dead” with the Catholic Church’s proclamation of the death of Christ as he preached at the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion on April 7 in St. Peter’s Basilica in the presence of Pope Francis.
At the beginning of the liturgy, Pope Francis arrived at the basilica dressed in red vestments in a wheelchair. Unlike in previous years, he was unable to lay prostrate but spent a moment in silent prayer before the main altar at the beginning of the liturgy.
The Vatican announced earlier in the day that the 86-year-old pope, who was hospitalized with bronchitis last week, will not be attending the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum on Friday night due to cold weather.
In his homily, Cantalamessa noted that the Catholic Church has proclaimed the death of Christ for 2,000 years. He said: “At every Mass, after the consecration, we say or sing: ‘We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again.’”
“Yet another ‘death of God’ has been proclaimed for a century and a half in our de-Christianized Western world. When, among cultivated people, one speaks of the ‘death of God,’ it is this other death of God – ideological and rather than historical – that is meant. To keep up with the times, some theologians hastened to build a theology around it: ‘The theology of the death of God.’”
“We cannot pretend to ignore the existence of this different narrative, without leaving prey to suspicion many believers,” he added.
Cantalamessa, who was made a cardinal in 2020 in recognition of his more than 40 years as Preacher of the Papal Household, said that he chose to speak about this topic “to keep believers – who knows, perhaps even just one or two university students – from being drawn into this vortex of nihilism which is the true ‘black hole’ of the spiritual universe.”
With relativism in the fields of ethics, philosophy, art, and religion, “nothing more is solid; everything is liquid, or even vaporous,” the cardinal said.
“As believers, it is our duty to show what there is behind, or underneath, that proclamation, namely the flicker of an ancient flame, the sudden eruption of a volcano that has never been extinguished since the beginning of the world,” he said.
After the homily, a deacon and Pope Francis read the 11 Good Friday Solemn Intercessions, which included prayers for the Jewish people, those who do not believe in God, and those suffering from war.
The Adoration of the Cross then took place, followed by the recitation of the Our Father and Holy Communion. Pope Francis kissed the crucifix after spending a moment in silent adoration standing at the foot of the cross.
During his homily, Cantalamessa urged Christians to heed a warning from Dante Alighieri, who wrote in the Divine Comedy: “‘Christians, be ye more serious in your movements; Be ye not like a feather at each wind, And think not every water washes you.’”
The cardinal said: “Let us, therefore, continue to repeat, with heartfelt gratitude and more convinced than ever, the words we proclaim at every Mass: ‘We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again.’”
Pope Francis prays the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum in Rome, Italy, on Good Friday, April 14, 2017. / Vatican Media.
Rome Newsroom, Apr 7, 2023 / 09:10 am (CNA).
Pope Francis will not be attending the annual Good Friday Stations of th… […]
Pope Francis washes the feet of 12 young men and women, inmates at Casal del Marmo juvenile detention center on Rome’s outskirts, during a Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Thursday, April 6, 2023. / Credit: Vatican Media
Rome Newsroom, Apr 6, 2023 … […]
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