A press briefing, Imminent Threat – or Ruse? Intel on Iran a Flashback to Iraq?, was organized by former career CIA officer Ray McGovern and presented at the National Press Club on March 26th. McGovern closed the event with a quote from the late civil rights activist Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “When injustice occurs, we are not all guilty but we are all responsible. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself.”

The ten speakers, all military veterans and/or intelligence professionals, were far from indifferent. For over five and a half hours they emphatically warned that America was duplicating the invasion of Iraq, thus far the most tragic foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. A new contender is in the works, engineered by many of the same vested interests.

Presenters brought a wide range of personal experiences encompassing the Cold War, Vietnam, the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East, the Forever Wars and Gaza. Their revelations were profoundly disturbing. Not least because of what should be well-known by the public but isn’t, and of incidents indicating a complete collapse of American ideals as most understand them. Due to the presentation’s length, this writeup is limited to overall themes and a few of many unsettling examples of grotesque deceptions.

Picking a dominant theme, betrayal does nicely. Betrayal of Americans, of those in foreign nations we professed to help, and of those serving in American military now at severe risk. The danger the military faces is amplified by a mainstream media that fails to properly enlighten the public. An American presidency soaked in breathtaking corruption, recently underscored by insider trading apparently tipped to the cha-cha of President Trump’s bewildering statements on Iran, meshes easily with a Secretary of War with an end of times theology and with a foreign power and its American proxies that have long influenced the White House, Congress and the press.

Speakers explored the creation of the “other” as a motive to go to war, cultivated by politicians and greased by companies that profit. It’s a long tradition. As Communism faded it fell to Muslims to personify “the other”, continuing the reordering of national spending priorities to first and foremost support military ventures, including nearly 800 military bases in over 80 countries for forward deployment, while shirking desperate needs like health care, education and infrastructure.

The program, presented by the Eisenhower Media Network, can be found on YouTube and below. About fifty minutes in one of the few remaining survivors of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 Six-Day War provides a riveting account of the struggle to survive a catastrophe at sea. It is a damning failure of journalism that such accurate eye-witness accounts, initially suppressed by shocking government coverup, are largely unknown.

Ray McGovern noted that there is no greater proof of Israeli influence than public ignorance over the USS Liberty.

GySgt Bryce Lockwood, Chief, USMC Deal, was part of a large intelligence force detailed to the ship, which on June 8th, 1967 was in international waters 13 1/2 miles off the Sinai Peninsula when its communications were jammed and it was attacked by unmarked Israeli Air Force jet fighters and Israeli motor torpedo boats. The latter inflicted 3,100 strikes from heavy caliber machine guns, as well fired five torpedos, one of which hit, killing 34 American crew members and injuring 174.

Lockwood’s account puts the lie to every aspect of the Israeli explanation that it mistook the American flag bearing ship for a particular Egyptian ship, the Al-Qasir, a WWI horse transport ship. Egyptian ships are painted black, not grey, the Al-Qasir was in dry dock for twenty years awaiting conversion to scrap.

What becomes obvious is that this was an attempt to sink a US ship with all hands and blame it on Egypt, bringing the US into the war, an early example of the false flag operations Israel excels at. One Israeli pilot radioed that the ship carried an American flag and refused to fire on it. He was courtmartialed and imprisoned.

The USS Liberty had been told it had no need for an escort because air cover was ten minutes away. The ship had been under attack for over an hour when a May Day got out, causing the attack to cease.

US rescue planes, moments away, were called back by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The officer dispatching the planes, the Skipper of the USS Saratoga, Captain Joseph Tully, assumed it was because they carried nukes. He relaunched aircraft with conventional weapons. McNamara called them back as well. Admiral Lawrence Guis of the US Sixth Fleet demanded to hear that order from higher authority. LBJ came on, saying, “Get those aircraft back, I will not have my allies embarrassed.”

Draw your own conclusions as to how LBJ knew which country had the unmarked planes when the USS Liberty didn’t. Those who thought that but for Vietnam, LBJ would’ve have been one of our greatest presidents, might reassess.

Lockwood says survivors were ordered to silence and told if they said anything they’d be sent to Ft. Leavenworth and forgotten. There has never been a Congressional investigation of the attack. Lockwood concludes that the USS Liberty was set up. “Israel realized it could do whatever it wanted, and the US Congress, the US government, would do nothing.” Admiral Thomas Moorer, then Chief of Naval Operations, later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and later US ambassador to the UK, personally concluded the Navy was ordered to accept the Israeli excuse.

The USS Liberty is an early and stark example that to Israel American lives are utterly expendable.

As an aside, in 1999 this writer was in a glider plane over the Israeli desert, piloted by a former jet pilot in the ’67 war. He said it wasn’t Egypt that first attacked, but it was Israel that initiated hostilities to provoke an Arab attack. Disillusioned, he left the military and joined a kibbutz. According to Ray McGovern, in 1982, before the National Defense Institute in Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin confirmed it was Israel that attacked first.

The presentation was peppered with insights that ought to tempt journalists to investigate further. One involved the late Rep. Pete McCloskey, (R-CA). Informed that Canadian Parliamentarians had learned of a Mossad plot to assassinate President George H.W. Bush at the 1991 Madrid Conference, McCloskey flew to Canada and interviewed the source, former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky. He told McCloskey the plot was motivated by Bush being seen as hostile because he opposed settlement expansion. The plot included a false flag operation blaming Palestinians in Beirut, as well as a PR campaign in Israel and the US to prepare for Dan Quayle, who was viewed as friendlier. McCloskey documented the interview and informed the U.S. Secret Service, thwarting the plot. How many Americans have a glimmer of this?

Perhaps the most ruinous betrayal was the invasion of Iraq. Several panelists offered personal experiences on its greasing by pro-Israel neocons highly placed in George W. Bush’s administration. One speaker, Dennis Fritz, had the opportunity to work for Douglas Feith, one of the invasion’s key architects. Tasked with reviewing pre-war planning documents for declassification, Fritz realized he had the Iraq War’s equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. His book, Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq, puts the lie to the government’s official reasons, and reveals Israel’s substantial role. Recall Bibi testifying to Congress that if the US didn’t invade, Saddam would arm terrorists around the world with nukes. Any echoes of late?

Complicit depravity is boundless. Focus a moment on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the U.S. and Israeli-backed private aid grift established in 2025 to replace United Nations efforts. One of the panelists, retired US Army Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, blew the whistle on the deadly sham, revealing the GHF hired and armed the Infidels Motorcycle Club, an extremist gang from the US, which Aguilar alleges fired on Palestinians seeking aid. Before the program shut down, the GHF was linked to hundreds of Palestinian civilian deaths and thousands of injuries. As to UNRWA, the UN aid organization the GHF was meant to replace, as of May 2026 nearly four hundred UNRWA personnel and support staff have been killed in Gaza.

According to Aguilar, CIA agents, both former and then current, used the GHF to collect data on Palestinians, including via AI from Microsoft and Google. Aguilar testified to the International Criminal Court and to the International Court of Justice. A number of countries reached out to him with questions. The US was not among them.

Another of Aguilar’s allegations holds ample food for thought. Aguilar says that years ago he was in the headquarters of the IDF southern command in Be’er-Sheva. He says while there he saw a plan that was paid for, designed and laid out. That plan now corresponds to phased plans of Project Sunrise, Jared Kushner’s and Steve Witcoff’s creation of extraction architecture for Gaza’s reconstruction, intertwined with the Board of Peace chaired by Donald Trump. Aguilar says he saw the plan in 2021, long before Octctober 7, 2023. Go figure.

As attacks on Iran resumed on February 28th while the US was negotiating, the world was shocked by the deadly triple-tap strike on a primary school complex in Minab, Iran, attended by children of many top officials. This writer asked if the motive was to demoralize Iranians. The panelists’ answers were uniform, adamant and affirmative. It was a page straight out of the playbook of demoralizing Palestinians. Panelists provided convincing technical and protocol expertise, including on detailed satellite surveillance, that there is no possible way the target wasn’t known to be a school long beforehand, or that the missiles, equipped with cameras, couldn’t have been nullified or rerouted at the last moment. In a just world it would be evidence in war crimes trials. As would the targeting of hundreds of hospitals in Iran and Lebanon, and of medical workers including ambulance crews. Our war criminals, top drawer.

Another constant theme is that of moral injury – lasting harm from events and falsehoods clashing with deeply felt moral beliefs. Such injuries were evident in all the speakers. We are fortunate they eloquently set examples of refusing to allow their internal pain to silence them.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of Traveling Boy.

BY SKIP KALTENHEUSER
Skip Kaltenheuser is a Washington, DC-based writer who has written for a wide variety of domestic and foreign publications on a broad range of topics, including politics, law, business, culture and travel. Writings sometimes attempt to explain Washington dysfunction and how the fix is put in.

To explore more of the bipartisan corruption undermining America, engage with more articles by Skip and other writers at Capitol Hill Citizen.

The post From the USS Liberty to Minab: Betrayal and Indifference appeared first on Traveling Boy.

Story and photo by Ed Rampell, a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic.

The recently revived Committee for the First Amendment, begun in 1947, during the era of anti-communist hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, took the struggle against censorship to the belly of the beast, Washington, D.C. There, original committee member Henry Fonda’s daughter Jane Fonda, along with folksinger Joan Baez, singer and actor Billy Porter, and other free speech champions took to the streets in protest.

They raised their voices to draw attention to and resist the Trump Administration’s increasingly authoritarian efforts to censor the arts, news reporters, and media organizations, epitomized by the takeover of the nearby Kennedy Center, recently renamed the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They did so by harkening back to another dark time in U.S. history, eighty years ago—the purges and persecutions of the McCarthy era.

The March 27 demonstration, which took place on a drizzly afternoon just prior to the “No Kings” Day mobilizations in the nation’s capital and elsewhere around the country, drew members of the press with television cameras perched on risers. Other journalists and supporters—all of whom had to first pass through security screening—sat on about 150 folding chairs in a gated area, facing a specially constructed stage in front of the Kennedy Center that was festooned with pro-freedom-of-speech signs and next to the Watergate Complex.

One attendee, Miles Taylor, said he came because he was “a big fan of what Jane Fonda has done with the Committee for the First Amendment, resurrecting a free speech organization from the McCarthy era for a moment that is arguably vastly more dangerous for democracy.” Taylor,  a former Department of Homeland Security official, is embroiled in his own free speech battle, as he told The Progressive: “Trump accused me of treason and opened up a federal investigation” because of an anonymously written 2018 op-ed in The New York Times critical of the first Trump Administration. 

The original Committee for the First Amendment actually predated the rise of Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunt, which began in 1950. 

“The Committee for the First Amendment is a recreated organization that was first formed in 1947 by Hollywood actors and directors rallying in support of a group called the Hollywood Ten,” James Lardner told The Progressive at the protest. His father, screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., was summoned before  the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), along with others, “to testify about their political beliefs and associations.” 

Asked by the Congressional inquisitors if he was a member of the Communist Party, Ring Lardner Jr. famously quipped: “I could answer the question the way you want . . .  but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.” Lardner, who had won an Academy Award for co-writing the 1942 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy comedy Woman of the Year, was imprisoned and fined for contempt of Congress along with the other members of the Hollywood Ten. 

His son James, who is involved in the climate action group Third Act and distributed No Kings Day leaflets at the event, believes threats to free speech today are “worse [than in the times of the Hollywood blacklist]. We are spiraling towards dictatorship, a white nationalist police state, to a degree that wasn’t true in the late 1940s.”  

From 1947-1960, the Hollywood Ten and about 300 other Hollywood talents who refused to provide to HUAC the names of others accused of leftwing politics, were labeled as “un-American” and blacklisted from working in the film and television industry. But none of them were ever charged with espionage or sabotage: Their real “crime” was publicly expressing viewpoints disapproved of by the U.S. government.

At 2:00 p.m. on Friday, March 27, Crys Matthews kicked off the program, saying, “I’m Black, a woman, lesbian, and a folksinger,” after which she sang her 2025 anthem “Sleeves Up.”. Next, activist and actor Jane Fonda took the stage, explaining why she was reestablishing the committee which her father had been an original member of in 1947, together with other movie stars such as Fredric March, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Judy Garland. 

“The attacks from the government are far more comprehensive today,” Fonda told the gathering. “Books are being banned, plaques and monuments depicting historical events this administration wants to forget are being removed [from] museums, the National Endowment of the Arts [and] state arts councils” are under attack, contends Fonda, who decried Trump’s seizing control of the Kennedy Center, where “fifty more people were fired just today. Some of them are with us [at this event].”

The two-time Oscar winner went on to condemn media mergers that the Trump Administration has been approving, while “he goes after artists. We can model courage, and courage is contagious . . . . The general public may think all this doesn’t affect them, but it does. If we don’t fight back, the news will be increasingly fake, and we won’t be allowed to know what’s happening. Our children’s academic curriculum will be actually censored and ticket costs for cultural events will go up while the quality will go down.”

Fonda proclaimed that “the bedrock of our democracy is the First Amendment,” which, she noted, “suffers greatly in times of war” as the government “works to crush internal dissent.” Fonda should know: She was surveilled by the FBI and persecuted for her outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam, where she intrepidly traveled as U.S. bombs dropped. She was pejoratively nicknamed “Hanoi Jane” because of her relentless advocacy of peace with the Vietnamese people.

Novelist Ann Patchett spoke next, warning that “Book burning is a terrible thing; 300 books have been pulled from bookshelves. It’s not just Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it’s Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” She was followed by former MSNBC and CNN hosts Joy Reid and Jim Acosta, both of whom spoke out against news censorship, denouncing the arrests and court cases against Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. Reid, who is a woman and  Black (two populations unable to vote for much of our nation’s existence), defended the First Amendment, saying: “You can fault the framers [of the Constitution] without faulting the frame.”

A highlight of the afternoon’s program was a reenactment of the June 12, 1956, HUAC hearing of Black activist, actor, and singer Paul Robeson, portrayed by Billy Porter. Robeson delivered what is probably the most defiant testimony in the annals of the blacklist, which the performers reenacted using the actual HUAC transcripts. 

“The reason that I am here today . . . from the mouth of the State Department itself, is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa . . . . The other reason that I am here today, again from the State Department . . . is that when I am abroad I speak out against the injustices against the Negro people of this land . . . . I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America.”

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers then performed, followed by legendary activist and musician Joan Baez, who sang Bob Dylan’s classic “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and the Civil Rights Movement freedom song, “Ain’t Gonna Let Anybody Turn Me ’Round.”  

Other speakers and performers included poet and author Rupi Kaur; Emmy-nominated writer and author Bess Kalb; Katie Bethell, executive director of  MoveOn and a No Kings organizer; Jessica J. González, co-CEO of the media reform group Free Press; and Logan Keith, national communications coordinator of the 50501 movement and an organizer with No Kings. 

Finally, the crowd heard from Kristy Lee, a self-described “gay, legally married folksinger from the South” who pulled out from a scheduled performance at the Kennedy Center over concerns about Trump’s “political branding” of events there. “Playing there would have cost me my integrity, which is worth more than a paycheck,” she explained. Lee called Fonda, Baez, and all of the other performers and speakers to join her onstage for a rousing rendition of her song “Free Love.”

The Los Angeles-based Fonda, still spry at age eighty-eight, later announced that she was leaving to attend the flagship No Kings rally in Minnesota. It was a moment that reminded this film historian of her father’s speech at the end of 1940’s film The Grapes of Wrath, when, during the depths of the Great Depression, Henry Fonda’s character Tom Joad leaves his family to join the struggle to unionize farmworkers, explaining: “I’ll be all around in the dark—I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look—wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.”   

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I write this from the Philippines, reflecting on our intrepid traveler who has traveled on. Perhaps Howie is revisiting the Hippie Trail from London to New Delhi and other routes of the far flung days of his youth.

I didn’t know Howie during his impressive career in music, and wasn’t aware of all the amazing musicians and bands he helped gain a foothold, from his DJ days to his years successfully shepherding Reprise Records, the venerable label created by Frank Sinatra.

I didn’t know the accolades that found him as a champion of free speech and an advocate for progressive voices. Those can be partially surveyed in obits by Variety: “Howie Klein, Top Executive at Sire and Reprise Records, DJ and Political Activist, Dies at 77“, and Billboard: “Howie Klein, Longtime Reprise President and Free Speech Advocate, Dies at 77“.

I stumbled across Howie’s wild and free-roaming blog, DOWNWithTYRANNY!, with its intriguing offerings on everything under the political sun. A slow writer, I was stunned at how Howie fired words like a Gatling gun, one topic falling after another. When I reached out to him pitching a piece promoting Bernie in the 2016 primaries, Howie was welcoming. For better or worse, his encouragement was what got me scribbling on politics again, which I will always appreciate. Even better, Howie allowed me to murder the elements of style. No prosecutions thus far.

Here’s my first piece for Howie: “Reflections on an Election Year When It Finally Hit the Fan“. Like the majority of my offerings, it appeared in his older DWT format, now mostly lost to the Internet’s UpsideDown.

I didn’t always agree with Howie on every point. For example, I never really bought Russiagate. I couldn’t swear Howie did, it might have been just too good a needle for him to resist. That doesn’t mean I was above having fun while hinting at my skepticism. It’s touched on in this scribble on the first inauguration of Cheeto Caligula: “Inauguration Day Weather Forecast: 54 Decrees, Cloudy, Light Wind, Chance of Golden Showers“.

I was frustrated that Russiagate was such a focus for many Democrats at the expense of time better spent explaining to the public the real damage and corruption underway behind the scenes. Not Howie’s sole focus, I hasten to say. His Gatling gun strafed the waterfront.

But for Democrats like Schiff and Schumer and their media support dogs, so earnestly repeating their recycled talking points, one couldn’t help but wonder if they were running interference for a different culprit of foreign influence. Certainly I believed in Israelgate. Howie let me fire away. With the horror we all see every day, that corruption is as painfully obvious as stepping on a nail. Unless you’re in the bought and paid for bleachers of Congress, or in media intimidated by the billionaire bullies.

The great irony of Russiagate, one Howie would appreciate, is that Cheeto Caligula couldn’t be doing any more damage to Americans and their freedoms, or to the world at large, than if Putin had a walkie-talkie under Cheeto’s pillow, suggesting, “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” The demented grifter has already set in motion measures that, unchecked, will speed the deaths of millions around the globe.

Early on, I also quibbled over the play of Trump as Hitler, thinking it over the top. How quaint of me that is now. Howie knew the likes of Trump, and of the Steve Miller ilk, and what they’d get away with if allowed.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, you know people by their enemies. Howie’s rogues’ gallery was unsurpassed. Fearless as his road trips in the dicey far flung, he happily alienated the purveyors of bipartisan hypocrisy, assailing the corporate Dems who foisted GOP-lite candidates on us, selling us out to the Big Money.

As I’d missed much of his writing of late, I wondered what Howie most wanted to impart as he raged against the dying of the light. Going back and reading Howie’s posts of the last half year, the distillation of the values he prioritized, the importance of his uncorrupted voice was clear. I appreciated the insights into his life, the around-the-corner correlations that Howie shared toward the end.

• This piece from September 29th, which starts “Although the first time I went to Morocco I was hanging out with Jimi Hendrix…”
• His Cancer Diaries, natch, which show how to rage, rage against the dying light, but do so with class and humor. They’re for anyone who has already struggled, personally or with the helplessness of a loved one’s struggle.
• In particular, this, from August 29th: “Cancer Diaries: Agency In The Face Of The Unthinkable— Negotiating With My Own New Body“. [I strongly recommend reading this; it’s one of Howie’s best pieces. –TN (Writer Thomas Neuburger, a long-time colleague of Howie’s and author of God’s Spies @ Substack)]
• Reading the comments to his work, it’s clear his personal revelations touched many as we inevitably contemplate mortality, allegedly a unique human enterprise. (But I wonder, what of elephant graveyards?)
• There are also his settled opinions on musical meanderings, like this one from Sept. 13, “Sorry To Say So But The Beatles Built Cathedrals, While The Stones Built… Bonfires“. [Another great read. –TN]
• Howie’s August series on failed republics and their comparisons to America, were among his warnings on hitching a ride in a handcart to Hell.
• Recent columns stepped up his revulsion at our forced complicity with genocide. From July 30th, “AIPAC Is A Reverse Litmus Test Now— No Progressives For Genocide“.
• He personalized his own situation on Sept. 9th: “Living on Edge— And Thinking About Gaza’s Endless Siege“. [From the piece: “My own suffering feels small by comparison. And yet, in some tiny way, it connects me to theirs.” –TN]

No doubt Howie realized early on that once a country covers for and enables genocide, it has tumbled into anything-goes territory. As we now see, in Trump’s America anything goes.

• His jabs against bipartisan hypocrisy on this matter showed no quarter. Knives out for Schumer and Jeffries were extra rusty. From Sept. 14th, “How Is Hakeem Jeffries’ Silence On Gaza Genocide Any Less Complicit Than Trump’s And The GOP’s?”
• From August 11th, “America’s Real Enemy Isn’t Just Trump… It’s Also The Democratic Party Establishment’s Cowardice“.

[TN: Here’s the lead image from the Jeffries piece. It shows Howie’s feelings about Democratic complicity with the genocide.]

Where would Howie be training his gatling gun now? Perhaps he’d be reminding us of the warnings of George Orwell as billionaire bullies like Larry Ellison purchase legacy media.

His targets would likely include the despicable among Democrats and their Big Money contributors who can claim big credits for Israel’s success in getting America’s political structure to mirror Israel’s — one page after another copied from the authoritarian’s handbook.

I’ve read recently that Rahm Emanuel is testing the waters for a run for President. Do a search on him at DWT for an idea of what Howie would do to him now to warn the Democrats.

Gavin Newsom wouldn’t fare much better under Howie’s gun. Do we really need any more political leaders who say, at this late stage, they’re confused over what genocide is?

Howie was a master at connecting the dots. He reminded me of the late artist Mark Lombardi, whose intricate drawings bewildered viewers, including law enforcement, as he made connections to the farthest reaches of the political and economic scandals of his day, providing substance to conspiracy. Lombardi is well worth a search.

My best offering to Howie was introducing him to the amazing artist Nancy Ohanian, NancyOhanian.com. Her tribute to Howie appears at the top of this piece.

We surely need an army of Howies now.

Footnote: “Game of solitaire” refers to the brainwashing trigger sentence in The Manchurian Candidate. 

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The passing of Pope Francis on April 21, 2025, at the age of 88 marked the end of a transformative 12-year papacy. Known for his humility, advocacy for the poor, and efforts to foster inclusivity within the Roman Catholic Church, Francis left a profound legacy. His death, caused by a stroke leading to heart failure, has set in motion the centuries-old ritual of the papal conclave to elect his successor, scheduled to begin on May 7, 2025, in the Sistine Chapel. This real-world event draws striking parallels to the 2024 Oscar-winning film Conclave, which dramatizes the secretive process of selecting a new pope, prompting comparisons between fact and fiction.

Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope, was a polarizing figure. He championed progressive reforms, such as opening discussions on women’s roles in the clergy and outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, while facing resistance from conservative factions within the Church. His appointment of 108 of the 135 cardinals eligible to vote in the upcoming conclave suggests his influence may shape the election, though tensions between progressive and traditionalist camps remain. The conclave, a sacred and secretive gathering, will see these cardinals sequestered until a new pope is chosen by a two-thirds majority, with white smoke signaling success.

The film Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, depicts a fictional papal election rife with intrigue, ideological clashes, and a shocking twist. While its dramatic flair— including a surprise ending—diverges from historical reality, the movie captures the essence of the conclave’s secrecy and politicking. For instance, the film portrays cardinals engaging in discreet lobbying, a dynamic mirrored in real life as cardinals have already begun discussions in Vatican corridors following Francis’ funeral.

Some interesting observations:

• In current discussions (in both the real life political drama and the movie), there has hardly been any mention of faith. This sadly emphasizes the lack of Biblical faith in the structure of the Catholic church. Is it really more of a political establishment than a spiritual bastion?
• Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal as a frustrated pious cardinal is a dramatic change from his villainous portrayals in his past films. For starters it was the first time he was shown sobbing in deep remorse. His nomination for best actor is well deserved.
• I wondered if the scenes were accurately portrayed under the gaze of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel because there was a scene where they focused on the depiction of hell. Upon investigation, that chapel is indeed where the political battle ensues. What a strange environment to contemplate the future of the church amidst the reminders of sinful man and punishment.
• One can easily imagine the tension in the conclave. Where else can you find a more stressful conglomeration of type A personalities?
• With today’s rising dementia epidemic, one wonders why it’s still a good idea to choose a pope for life. Will future popes have the decency to resign like Pope Benedict XVI who realized his failing health?
• There was a scene where a woman (Isabella Rosellinni) addressed the conclave. In reality, I doubt it would have occurred because the conclave is supposed to be a “men only” club. And Rossellini winning a nomination for her short role? Really?
• It was interesting to see the cooking staff preparing the meals. Imagine the juggling act during those days anticipating the “chosen king.” Who says the Catholic Church holds a vow of poverty? One is reminded of another movie — “The Shoes of the Fisherman.”
• As with many current Hollywood movies, this movie has a definite liberal agenda. It’s good to be aware of its intentions.

One last observation: Some writers mentioned that despite Pope Francis’ humility and piousness, he himself doubted that all his efforts were enough to earn his salvation. However, there is no definitive evidence from Pope Francis’ public statements, writings, or actions that he explicitly doubted his personal salvation in the sense of questioning whether he would be saved. However, he frequently spoke about doubt as a natural part of faith, emphasizing its role in deepening one’s relationship with God, and made remarks about salvation that some interpreted as controversial. Below, I explore these aspects to address your question, incorporating relevant context from his teachings and public reactions.

Pope Francis on Doubt and Faith

Pope Francis often framed doubt as a constructive element of spiritual growth, not necessarily tied to personal salvation but to understanding God more deeply. In a 2016 general audience, he admitted to having “many” doubts about faith, stating, “We do not need to be afraid of questions and doubts because they are the beginning of a path of knowledge and going deeper; one who does not ask questions cannot progress either in knowledge or in faith.” He suggested that doubts, when approached with humility and a desire for truth, lead to a stronger faith, citing saints who experienced such trials without losing trust in God. In a 2018 dialogue with seminarians, he called doubt “a richness” that prompts seeking truth and encountering Jesus Christ.

Sometimes the answers to important questions (like the question of salvation) is very plain to see. Two verses come to mind:

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” — Ephesians 2: 8-9

“Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” — John 14:6

The reason it seems so complex to many is because people are not satisfied with the answers and justify their proclivities with more favorable conclusions.

Links:

• Pope Francis says doubt is key to life of faith
• Faith Without Doubt Cannot advance
• Pope to Italian seminarians: “Doubt is invitation to seek truth”

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