What’s so ‘wrong’ with the Vatican flag?

The Vatican flag. / Credit: Bohumil Petrik/CNA CNA Staff, Apr 5, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA). What does the flag of Vatican City look like? What should it look like?Beyond the recognizable general design of the yellow-and-white flag with the crossed keys on its right side representing the papacy, most Catholics — even if they see this flag displayed every day at their parish — don’t scrutinize the details. That changed two years ago, when many people learned for the first time — thanks in part to a viral CNA story — that a commonly-used design for the Vatican flag, flown frequently even at the Vatican itself, actually contains a small but easily-noticed error: The circular bottom of the papal tiara should be white, not red, as depicted on many, many flags (oh, and even on emojis). Given that the image of the “Flag of Vatican City” displayed on Wikipedia from 2017 to 2022 had the erroneous red-tiara design, many people in 2023 deduced that the Wikipedia entry had likely contributed to the proliferation of incorrect flags worldwide. (For better or worse, the CNA story and other news articles contributed to that narrative.)A screenshot shows Vatican flags with the incorrect design, possibly drawn from Wikipedia, for sale in April 2025. Credit: Amazon/screenshotFather William Becker, a flag expert and pastor at St. Columbanus Parish in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, told CNA at the time that the variations demonstrated a need for the Vatican to step in and clarify exactly what its flag should look like. And lo and behold, just months after flag enthusiasts on Reddit discovered the error, Pope Francis promulgated a new Fundamental Law of Vatican City State, which, to Becker’s delight, finally included a high-resolution image and a detailed description of what the flag should look like. The long and the short of it is that the official design for the flag in the 2023 Fundamental Law does not include the red disk at the bottom of the tiara. The official design for the Vatican City coat of arms, also newly-promulgated along with the flag design, doesn’t have a red disk either. Case closed? Not quite. The revelations about the flag and the proliferation of “incorrect” flags sparked a passionate debate online — a debate that raised new questions.Wikipedia’s fault? At first, the Vatican flag saga seemed to be a textbook case of “citogenesis” — a term that refers to the manner in which false information can be inadvertently “laundered” after appearing on Wikipedia, especially if authoritative sources such as journalists pick it up.In this particular case, given that no one noticed that the flag design on Wikipedia was wrong for a period of several years, it seemed likely that many people — including flag makers — assumed it was correct, given how many red-disk flags now exist out in the wild.Doubts began to stir, however, when users online pointed out numerous examples of older Vatican flags, such as the one Apollo astronauts brought to the moon in 1969, that have the red tiara design as well. A single Reddit user discovered at least four other Vatican flags in his personal collection that feature the red disk and that he says all date to the mid- to late 20th century.A small Vatican flag brought to the moon by Apollo astronauts in 1969, which now is displayed in the Vatican Museums. Above the flag are tiny moon rocks. Credit: Public domainIn addition, older pre-internet flag reference books, such as the British Admiralty’s “Flags of All Nations” (1955) depicted the tiara with a red base, potentially influencing flag makers in the U.S. and U.K.And in a final, ironic twist, the Vatican itself likely contributed to the confusion nearly two decades ago when it posted this image of its flag, which, head-scratchingly, featured a red disk, despite the 2000 Vatican constitution — which was in force at the time — not featuring one. So was the infamous Wikipedia edit a cause of the confusion or a symptom? The obvious solution to the question is to ask the Wikipedia editor why he or she changed the public image file to a red-disk design in the first place. Wikipedia is an anonymous forum, though, which makes such a request tricky. By a stroke of luck, however, the editor who changed the design in 2017, WikiDan61, shed some light on his decision-making process on the Wikipedia talk page in early 2025. Perhaps unsurprisingly, WikiDan cited examples of red-disk flags he had seen out in the world — such as this one from 2008 — as the reason he thought the red-disk flag was the correct one. “To be fair, I did not create the image of the flag with a red interior for the tiara; that image [existed] in the world prior to my creation of the Commons SVG file,” WikiDan61 wrote in response to an interview request from a (non-CNA) journalist. (That journalist created a video essay on the Vatican flag controversy that is well worth watching.) “It seems even the Vatican itself is not clear on the design of its flag. That being said, I’m not rea