On Friday morning, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps posted a message on Telegram addressed to the ordinary residents of seven countries. Stay at least 500 meters away, it said, from American hotels, American banks, American companies, high-rise towers, and properties owned by the Trump family. None of those countries is at war with Iran. The people reading that message are shopkeepers, nurses, taxi drivers, and schoolchildren in Manama and Kuwait City and Amman. They have been informed, publicly and in writing, that their proximity to an American logo now determines whether they live. The Church has words for what that is, and they are not gentle ones.
The News Story
The United States and Iran traded strikes for a fourteenth straight day as President Donald Trump said he was close to deciding whether to launch what he called “a massive attack” on Iran, and as the widening conflict pushed Brent crude above $100 a barrel and drew warnings from the United Nations that the Middle East was nearing “the edge of the unimaginable.”
U.S. Central Command said it completed a 13th consecutive night of strikes intended to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media reported overnight explosions at Qeshm Island, Bandar Abbas and Ahvaz. Iran’s health ministry, cited by the state-run IRNA news agency, said U.S. strikes have killed 59 people and injured 666 since June 27.
In an interview with Axios published Thursday, Trump said: “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.” He said Israel “would join in two minutes if I ask them to” but that “we don’t need anybody,” and said Iran wants to negotiate but “haven’t received enough pain yet.” Two U.S. officials told Axios no decision had been made and no new orders issued. Trump met senior advisers and Cabinet officials Friday to weigh escalation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking in the Philippines, said the administration is pursuing “a head for an eye.”
Iran’s army said it carried out drone strikes Friday on U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Jordan. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry sounded missile sirens and urged residents to shelter. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility and, via Telegram, warned residents of the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria to stay at least 500 meters from U.S.-linked sites, including American hotels, banks, high-rise towers and “properties owned by the Trump family.” Near Erbil, in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, security forces shot down explosive-laden drones; the airport closed briefly and reopened.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea on Thursday, opening a second maritime front near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Brent crude topped $100, its highest since May, before easing Friday, still on track for a weekly gain near 10 percent; U.S. retail gasoline passed $4 a gallon. Trump threatened “major military punishment” against Iran and the Houthis and said shipping damages would be paid from Iranian funds the U.S. controls. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called that “an incendiary precedent.” Trump separately warned Russia and China against selling arms to Tehran.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council, “The situation is getting out of control.” The House passed a second, largely symbolic war-powers resolution Thursday urging an end to the war. The United Kingdom withdrew diplomatic staff from Iran, and Qatar Airways suspended flights to Bahrain, Kuwait and Erbil through July. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due in Washington on Tuesday. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
Anonymous people on a city street. The IRGC’s Friday warning was addressed to civilians in seven countries that are not parties to this war, telling them their safety now depends on how close they stand to an American building. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 276141861.
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Read the Telegram message again, slowly, because the wording does something the missile footage never shows you.
“To all citizens and residents of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria: For your safety, you are urged to immediately stay away from military and security bases, facilities, and headquarters, as well as locations where U.S. forces are deployed… Immediately maintain a distance of at least 500 meters from any covert or concealed accommodations used by U.S. military personnel. These locations include American hotels, American banks, American companies, high-rise towers, properties owned by the Trump family, and investments associated with them.”
That is not a warning issued out of mercy, whatever the phrase “for your safety” is doing there. It is an announcement that a category of civilian building in seven neutral countries has been declared a target, and that the people who work in those buildings, bank in them, sleep in them, or simply walk past them on the way to school have been assigned a role in a war nobody asked them to join. The bank teller in Manama is now a variable in Tehran’s pressure calculation on Washington. Five hundred meters is the width of her margin.
And I want to be careful here, because the temptation of a post like this is to make it a one-sided indictment. It cannot be. On the same day that message went out, the president of the United States told a reporter that the Iranians “haven’t received enough pain yet,” and his Secretary of State described the American posture as “a head for an eye.” Both governments are now openly describing suffering as a lever. One says it out loud to a journalist in Washington. The other publishes it on Telegram in Arabic. The moral structure is identical, and the Church’s judgment falls on it without regard to which flag is flying.
The Person Is Always An End
Start where the Church starts, which is not with states or straits but with the person standing on the sidewalk.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the Vatican’s own organized summary of everything she teaches about society, takes up violence against civilians directly. Its judgment is one of the flattest sentences in the whole document: “Terrorism is to be condemned in the most absolute terms. It shows complete contempt for human life and can never be justified, since the human person is always an end and never a means.” [9]
Notice the reason the Compendium gives. It does not say terrorism is wrong because it is illegal, or because it destabilizes regions, or because it invites reprisal. It says terrorism is wrong because it treats a person as a means. That is the whole argument, and it reaches much further than the word “terrorism” usually does in ordinary speech. Any act that reaches a decision-maker by way of somebody else’s body treats that somebody as a tool. The question the Compendium asks about any use of force is simple and merciless: is this person being harmed because of what he did, or because of the effect his harm will have on somebody else?
Apply that test to Friday. The civilians of Bahrain and Kuwait and Qatar did not launch the strikes on Qeshm and Bandar Abbas. They are being warned away from American buildings because their government hosts an American base, or because an American company rents an office downtown. Their vulnerability is useful. That is the entire reason they appear in this story. Under the standard the Compendium sets, that is contempt for human life, and the Church says so in the most absolute terms she has.
The same document describes what this kind of violence does to a region, and the description reads like a summary of the past month. Terrorism, it says, “sows hatred, death, and an urge for revenge and reprisal,” and it notes that its targets “are generally places of daily life and not military objectives in the context of a declared war.” [10] Places of daily life. A hotel lobby. A bank branch. A desalination plant that supplies 90 percent of a country’s drinking water. Kuwait has now had its water infrastructure hit and its border crossing droned. Erbil’s airport shut down for a morning because explosive drones were coming in over the runway. These are the places where people live their ordinary hours, and they have become the terrain of this war.
Intolerable Pressures
The Catechism sharpens the point with a phrase worth memorizing. Treating hostage-taking and kidnapping, it teaches that such acts “bring on a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong.” It continues: “Terrorism threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately; it is gravely against justice and charity.” [11]
“By means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures.” The IRGC’s Telegram post is a threat, issued publicly to a population, to produce pressure. It works exactly the way the Catechism describes. Nobody in Manama has to be hit for the message to do its job. The fear is the payload. Sirens sounded over Bahrain on Friday, and residents were told to shelter; every family that ran to an interior room was, in that moment, being used.
Both halves of the Catechism’s judgment matter here, and Catholics tend to remember only the first. Terrorism is gravely against justice, yes. It is also gravely against charity. Justice names what we owe a person by right. Charity names the love we owe him because God made him and died for him. The Church insists that violence aimed at bystanders violates both at once, which is why she will not let this be reduced to a debate about international law and rules of engagement. Something is owed to that bank teller that no treaty created and no treaty can dissolve.
The Right To Stand Aside
There is a second Catholic principle in this story that almost never gets mentioned, and it belongs to the smaller countries getting hit.
Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and the UAE are not belligerents. They are small states living between two much larger powers, and the shape of their week was decided entirely in Washington and Tehran. Pope John XXIII saw this exact problem and wrote about it in Pacem in Terris, quoting Pius XII: although larger states will inevitably shape the terms of their dealings with smaller ones, “these smaller States cannot be denied their right, in keeping with the common good, to political freedom, and to the adoption of a position of neutrality in the conflicts between nations. No State can be denied this right, for it is a postulate of the natural law itself, as also of international law.” [12]
A postulate of the natural law. That is strong language, and it means the right of a small nation to stay out of somebody else’s fight is not a courtesy extended by the powerful. It belongs to that nation the way the right to life belongs to a man. When Iran fires on Kuwaiti water plants to punish American policy, it is violating that right. When a great power stations forces in a small country in ways that make the small country a magnet for retaliation, the moral question presses on the great power too. The Gulf states are being treated by both sides as terrain. Pacem in Terris says they are nations, with a natural right to decline.
I do not think most American Catholics have ever heard this taught. We are used to thinking about war in terms of the two governments doing the shooting. The Church keeps insisting there is a third party in nearly every modern conflict, the neighbors, and that their rights do not evaporate because they are inconvenient.
Fairness requires putting the strongest version of the other argument on the table, because a serious Catholic owes that much to the people he disagrees with. Tehran’s case runs roughly like this. Iran is under sustained bombardment. Its ports, radar sites, and coastal defenses have been struck for thirteen straight nights. It has no capacity to reach the American homeland, and the American forces attacking it operate from bases hosted by Gulf governments that have chosen a side by leasing the runways. On that reading, those bases are legitimate military objectives, and the warning to civilians is an attempt, however crude, to reduce harm to people who happen to live near them. Something similar can be said in Washington’s favor: pressure on Tehran is aimed at reopening a waterway that carries food and fuel to poor countries, and the warning to shipping is meant to keep merchant crews out of the way.
Neither argument is frivolous. Both fail at the same point. A military base may indeed be a lawful target. An American bank branch is not. A high-rise tower is not. A hotel is not. The moment the list expands from “where U.S. forces are deployed” to “American companies” and “properties owned by the Trump family,” the criterion has stopped being military function and become national association, which is another way of saying the people inside are being targeted for whose logo hangs over their heads. A warning issued in advance does not convert an illegitimate target into a legitimate one. It only spreads the fear more efficiently.
What Leo XIV Actually Changed
Here I have to say plainly what the Church now teaches, because it differs from what many of us were catechized to believe.
For centuries Catholics reached for just war theory to sort these questions: just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality, discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. In Magnifica Humanitas, published this past May, Pope Leo XIV writes: “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” [13]
That sentence caused a great deal of noise, and it deserves to be read carefully rather than shouted about. Leo XIV preserves the right of self-defense in the strictest sense. What he refuses is the use of the framework as a permission slip. His stated worry is that the criteria have become a checklist that powerful states run through on their way to doing what they had already decided to do. He also names, in the same section, a “normalization of war,” a revival of war as an ordinary instrument of politics while the ethical limits that once restrained it wear away. Read the past two weeks and tell me he was wrong. A fourteenth consecutive night of strikes gets reported the way a weather pattern gets reported.
The precedence rule in Catholic theology is not complicated: when the more recent Magisterial teaching develops or corrects the older one, the more recent governs. So Leo XIV’s judgment is where a Catholic stands today on this question, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, whom I love and cite often, does not get to override a reigning pope on a matter the pope has directly addressed. The honest thing is to say that the old framework and the new teaching do not simply agree, because the Holy Father says they do not.
What Leo XIV does not abandon is the protection of the innocent. In the same encyclical, he writes that “target selection and the use of force must not confuse combatants and non-combatants, nor ignore the impact on defenseless populations.” [14] That principle survives the collapse of the older framework because it never depended on the framework in the first place. It comes from the dignity of the person, which is bedrock. The Catechism states the ancient rule in one line: “Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.” [15]
Set that beside the Telegram message and the “head for an eye” doctrine and the honest verdict is uncomfortable for everyone. A warning that tells civilians in neutral countries to keep 500 meters from American buildings confuses combatants and non-combatants by design; the confusion is the strategy. And a stated policy of inflicting escalating pain until a government yields treats a population as the pressure point. Neither passes. The Church does not grade these on a curve.
Love, Not Fear
The last thing to say is the one a deacon is obliged to say, and it is the part that will sound naive to people who make policy for a living.
Pacem in Terris observed, more than sixty years ago, that the conviction that disputes must be settled by negotiation rather than arms owes its origin chiefly to the terrifying destructive force of modern weapons. John XXIII then wrote a sentence that has aged into prophecy: “in this age which boasts of its atomic power, it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice.” [16] A few paragraphs on, he named what has to replace it: “love, not fear, must dominate the relationships between individuals and between nations.” [17]
Fear is dominating these relationships right now, deliberately and as a matter of announced strategy. That is what “they haven’t received enough pain yet” means. That is what a 500-meter warning means. Both sides have concluded that fear is the most efficient instrument available, and both are probably correct about its efficiency in the short run. The Church’s claim is that fear cannot build anything that lasts, because fear produces compliance and never produces peace.
The Compendium is precise about the difference. Peace, it teaches, “is not merely the absence of war, nor can it be reduced solely to the maintenance of a balance of power between enemies. Rather it is founded on a correct understanding of the human person and requires the establishment of an order based on justice and charity. Peace is the fruit of justice.” [18] A ceasefire produced by exhausting a population is a balance of terror wearing a peace treaty’s clothes. It will hold exactly as long as the terror does. The interim deal signed last month collapsed inside of six weeks, which is roughly what the Church would predict of an arrangement built on leverage rather than on justice.
Leo XIV points at the alternative in the same paragraph where he sets aside the older framework: humanity possesses far more effective tools for resolving conflicts, and he names three of them: dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. [19] The third one is the one nobody in this story is offering, and it is the only one that ends anything permanently.
So here is where a Catholic lands as this weekend begins. Pray for the 59 dead in Iran and the 666 wounded. Pray for the four American service members killed at Muwaffaq Salti and in Iraq, and for the families holding folded flags. And pray, specifically, for the people this post is about, the ones with no stake in the outcome and no say in the decision: the residents of seven countries who woke up Friday to a public message telling them how far to stand from a hotel. They are not collateral. They are not a pressure point. They are, each one of them, an end and never a means, and any strategy that requires them to be otherwise has already lost the argument the Church has been making since long before either of these governments existed.
Footnotes
- Jane Arraf, “Trump Threatens Iran Escalation as Tit-for-Tat Airstrikes Continue,” NPR, July 24, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/24/g-s1–135417/us-iran-war-updates.
- Courtney Subramanian, Eltaf Najafizada, and Dan Williams, “US, Iran Exchange Strikes as Trump Mulls Wider Offensive,” Bloomberg via The Spokesman-Review, July 24, 2026, https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jul/24/us-iran-exchange-strikes-as-trump-mulls-wider-offe/.
- Barak Ravid, “Exclusive: Trump Says He’s ‘Close’ to Decision on ‘Massive Attack’ Against Iran,” Axios, July 23, 2026, https://www.axios.com/2026/07/23/trump-axios-iran-interview.
- Robert McGreevy, “Crude Oil Prices Shoot Up After Red Sea Joins Strait of Hormuz as Iran War’s Second Choke Point,” Fox News, July 24, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/iran-war-trump-oil-prices-rising–07–24–26.
- “July 24, 2026: Escalation in Iran War Nears 2-Week Mark,” CNN, July 24, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/world/live-news/iran-war-trump.
- “For a 2nd Time, House Approves Resolution to End the War in Iran, in a Rebuke to Trump,” NPR, July 23, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1–5904515/congress-iran-war-powers-vote.
- “Iran, Houthis Strike Tankers as US Bombing Continues: What’s the Latest?,” Al Jazeera, July 23, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/23/iran-houthis-strike-tankers-as-us-bombing-continues-whats-the-latest.
- “Trump ‘Close to Making a Decision’ on ‘Massive Attack’ Against Iran,” The Hill, July 23, 2026, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5986262-trump-iran-us-military-attack/.
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 514.
- Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 513.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2297.
- Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris: On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity, and Liberty (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1963), no. 124, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html.
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), no. 192, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html.
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 199.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2313.
- Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 127.
- Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 129.
- Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 494.
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192.
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