An Act of Force: What the Church Asks of a Blockade Meant to Bring Iran to Terms

Iran put a 7-day plan on the table at the United Nations on Friday: lift the blockade, release the frozen money, stop the shooting everywhere, and the Strait of Hormuz reopens on the sixth day. By Friday night, according to The Wall Street Journal, the president had turned it down and told aides he expects the bombing to resume after the midterms. The bombing is the headline. The blockade is the policy, the pressure Washington means to keep on until Tehran gives way, and the Church has a short, exacting teaching about that kind of pressure and about who is allowed to pay for it.

The News Story

President Donald Trump has rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and pause fighting across the region within 7 days, and has told aides he expects a renewed U.S. bombing campaign against Iran after the November midterm elections, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday night, citing U.S. officials. Reuters said it could not immediately confirm the report. As of Saturday, the White House had issued no formal response, and Iran said it was still waiting for one.¹

According to the Journal, Trump is privately skeptical that Tehran will meet his demands on its nuclear program. Officials told the paper that the scope of any new strikes is unclear and that Trump has not made a final decision. He is reluctant to restart major combat operations, in part because the U.S. wants to preserve munitions for other contingencies, and his position could change in the coming weeks or be shaped by the election results. The U.S. has also told Tehran and regional mediators that it will not lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports.²

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi laid out the plan to reporters at the United Nations on Friday, saying it had been passed to Washington through Qatar. The clock would start once the U.S. accepts. Over the first 4 to 5 days, Washington would lift the blockade, waive sanctions on Iranian oil sales, release frozen Iranian assets (about $12 billion, according to Al Jazeera), and observe a ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon. Iran would reopen the strait on the sixth day, and talks toward a final agreement would begin on the seventh. “The choice now rests with the United States,” Araghchi said. He added that it “would be better” to reach a deal before the midterms.³

The plan closely follows a memorandum of understanding the two governments signed on June 17 after Qatari and Pakistani mediation. That arrangement collapsed within weeks amid disputes over control of shipping through the strait, and Trump declared it over in July.⁴

The two sides remain far apart on the nuclear question. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran would show no flexibility on its program even if Washington accepted the Hormuz proposal, and would neither give up domestic enrichment nor ship its highly enriched uranium abroad. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Fox News on Thursday that Iran was willing to dilute its enriched uranium and accept verification.⁵

Washington has signaled it sees little reason to give up its leverage first. State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said Friday that Trump “holds all the cards” and that any agreement must be “actions-based.” A U.S. official said about 40 million barrels of oil had moved through the strait in the previous 48 hours, and U.S. Central Command said its forces had redirected 122 commercial vessels to enforce the blockade. On Friday night, Trump posted an image to Truth Social showing the strait labeled “TRUMP STRAIT.” A U.S. official had earlier described the talks through mediators as “positive and constructive.”⁶

On Thursday, the Senate voted 49 to 50 to reject a war powers resolution that would have directed the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress authorized the war. Republican Senators Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis voted in favor, and Democrat John Fetterman voted against. A separate, nonbinding concurrent resolution cleared both chambers in June; Trump called that vote “poorly timed and meaningless.”⁷

The war began on February 28 with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and has killed thousands. Iran has since struck U.S. partners in the Gulf, and its Houthi allies in Yemen have attacked Saudi cities, energy sites and shipping.⁸

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Policy Under the Headline

Our analysis starts with the part of Friday’s report that drew the least attention. The bombing is the headline, and it may or may not come. The blockade is already here. According to the Journal’s account, as summarized by Breitbart, Washington has told Tehran and the Qatari mediators that it has no intention of lifting the blockade of Iranian ports, and it is betting that mounting economic pressure will force Iran into an agreement on terms favorable to the United States and the Gulf states. The State Department’s spokesman says the United States is “severing” the regime’s financial lifelines and that the president “holds all the cards.” Central Command says American forces have now redirected 122 commercial vessels.⁹

So the question for a Catholic this weekend is narrower than war or peace. It’s this: what may a government do with economic pressure, and what may it never do? The Church has answered that question in a single paragraph, and she answered it with this kind of case in mind.

What the Church Permits

When it comes to sanctions, the Church does permit their use under certain conditions. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says that sanctions “seek to correct the behavior of the government of a country that violates the rules of peaceful and ordered international coexistence or that practices serious forms of oppression with regard to its population.”¹⁰

Give Washington its due here. Iran’s government has fired on commercial shipping, struck Gulf neighbors with drones and missiles, backs the Houthis, who are now firing on Saudi cities, and kept a stockpile of highly enriched uranium it refuses to ship out. Its record toward its own people is its own long indictment. A Catholic can grant, without embarrassment, that this is a government whose choices someone ought to press it to reconsider.

Then the Compendium sets the terms, and they are strict. The purpose of the sanctions “must be clearly defined.” The measures must be evaluated from time to time for their effectiveness “and their real impact on the civilian population.” Their true object, the same paragraph says, is to open the way to negotiation and dialogue. And then the two sentences that bind hardest: “Sanctions must never be used as a means for the direct punishment of an entire population: it is not licit that entire populations, and above all their most vulnerable members, be made to suffer because of such sanctions.” And: “An economic embargo must be of limited duration and cannot be justified when the resulting effects are indiscriminate.”¹⁰

John Paul II Called It by Its Name

The Compendium took that teaching from Pope John Paul II, who put it to the diplomats accredited to the Holy See in January 1995. He stated the purpose: an embargo “is a means of exerting pressure on governments which have violated the international code of good conduct and causing them to reconsider their choices.” Then he said the thing politicians rarely say about sanctions. “But in a sense it is also an act of force and, as certain cases of the present moment demonstrate, it inflicts grave hardships upon the people of the countries at which it is aimed.” And he told the diplomats what that demands of them: “before imposing such measures, it is always imperative to foresee the humanitarian consequences of sanctions, without failing to respect the just proportion that such measures should have in relation to the very evil which they are meant to remedy.”¹¹

“In a sense,” he said, about an embargo written on paper. A naval blockade enforced by warships redirecting 122 ships needs no qualifier. It’s an act of force in every sense, and the Church’s standards for force apply to it in full.

The Tests, Applied to This Week

Take the Compendium’s conditions one at a time.

Is the purpose clearly defined? The stated purposes are real ones: no Iranian bomb, and an open strait. But on Friday Iran offered to reopen the strait on the sixth day of a deal, and the reported answer was that the blockade stays until Tehran accepts better terms. I can’t see the negotiating papers, and Iran’s refusal to move on enrichment is a genuine obstacle. Still, a measure meant to correct a government’s behavior has to be able to say what corrected behavior looks like. “Actions-based,” the State Department’s phrase, is a good start. It needs a list.

Is it limited in duration? The war is 7 months old. The president has now reportedly tied the next phase to November 3, an election date with no connection to anything Iran does or fails to do. A limit the Church would recognize is measured against “the very evil which they are meant to remedy,” in John Paul’s words. The electoral calendar is a different yardstick entirely.

Does it punish an entire population? Here the reporting is hard to read. Iran’s pharmacists’ association says about 800 medicines are in short supply, 90 of them essential or life-saving. Insulin costs up to 6 times what it did a year ago. A Tehran physician told Al Jazeera of reports that rotavirus vaccine imports have been halted by the maritime blockade, and CNN reports that this year’s flu vaccinations were called off. The cost of essential food items is up more than 123% in a year.¹² Washington permits medicine and food on paper, and banks and trade partners, wary of the penalties, often refuse the business anyway. Iran’s own government, its insurers and the war’s bombing of drug factories share the blame, and the Church doesn’t let Tehran off. But the Compendium asks the party imposing the pressure to evaluate its “real impact on the civilian population,” and the impact is now plain enough to read in a pharmacy line.

Notice how the strategy is supposed to work. Iranian diplomats have acknowledged to Arab mediators the deepening crisis at home, and the Revolutionary Guard, by the Journal’s account, is prepared for a long conflict.⁹ The men who decide will be the last in Iran to go without insulin. The pressure reaches them through the people with the least say, which is precisely the route the Compendium forbids.

Thomas on Intention, and Leo on Power

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that even a use of force with lawful authority and a just cause can “be rendered unlawful through a wicked intention,” and he quotes St. Augustine on what the right intention is: “We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace.”¹³ Pressure held for its own sake, or held only to sweeten one’s terms once the other side has already come to the table, fails that test, however good the original cause.

Our present Holy Father has moved the Church’s teaching past the old frame here, and the move matters for this story. In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV writes that, “without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” the “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” and that humanity has better tools: “dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”¹⁴ Leo narrows the permission for force, and the demand about intention stays exactly where Thomas put it. He also names the habit of mind behind the phrase “holds all the cards.” He calls it a “culture of power,” in which “the availability of resources and the ability to dominate tend to dictate the agenda,” and “the concrete tragedy of peoples at war is reduced to a secondary consideration in relation to strategic interests.”¹⁵

Leo is a realist about regimes like Iran’s. He asks for a “healthy realism” that seeks peace through “credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, conflict prevention and the protection of civilians.”¹⁵ Verification is the part Washington should seize. Iran’s president told Fox News on Thursday that his government would dilute its enriched uranium and submit to verification. Take him at his word and write the inspections into the deal. Cards are for playing.

What I’d Watch

Watch whether the administration says, in plain words, what Iran would have to do for the blockade to lift. A measure with a stated end can be judged against the Compendium; a measure with no end slides toward the punishment it forbids.

Watch the medicine licenses, too. And pray for a 35-year-old kidney patient CNN calls Sima, who found her medication in the seventh Tehran pharmacy she tried and can no longer afford a full dose.¹² She has no vote on the Strait of Hormuz and no seat at the table. Pray for the sailors enforcing the blockade and for the negotiators on both sides, that they spend the leverage they have on the peace it was meant to buy.

---

This story turns on the Church’s teaching on sanctions: pressure on a government is lawful only as a road to negotiation, limited in time, and never paid for by a whole people.

One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.

Get it by email

---

Notes

1. ↑ Menna AlaaElDin and Parisa Hafezi, “Iran awaits U.S. move after WSJ report says Trump rejects peace plan,” Reuters via The Spokesman-Review, September 25, 2026, spokesman.com; Michael Luciano, “Trump Reportedly Rejects Iranian Proposal and Plans To Resume Bombing After Election,” Mediaite, September 25, 2026, mediaite.com.
2. ↑ Joshua Klein, “Report: Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Hormuz Proposal, Expects to Renew Strikes After Midterms,” Breitbart, September 25, 2026, breitbart.com; Luciano, “Trump Reportedly Rejects Iranian Proposal.”
3. ↑ “Iran says it awaits US response on seven-day roadmap to end war,” Al Jazeera, September 25, 2026, aljazeera.com; AlaaElDin and Hafezi, “Iran awaits U.S. move”; Klein, “Report: Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Hormuz Proposal”; “Trump rejects Iran’s 7-day Hormuz proposal; bombing may resume after US midterms: Report,” The Week, September 26, 2026, theweek.in.
4. ↑ Al Jazeera, “Iran says it awaits US response”; Klein, “Report: Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Hormuz Proposal.”
5. ↑ AlaaElDin and Hafezi, “Iran awaits U.S. move”; Emma Bussey, “Iranian president blames US for Middle East conflict while denying nuclear ambitions, offers to dilute uranium,” Fox News, September 24, 2026, foxnews.com; Klein, “Report: Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Hormuz Proposal.”
6. ↑ Klein, “Report: Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Hormuz Proposal”; AlaaElDin and Hafezi, “Iran awaits U.S. move”; Al Jazeera, “Iran says it awaits US response.”
7. ↑ Sarah Lee, “Senate Blocks Iran War Powers Resolution in 49-50 Vote,” HNGN, September 24, 2026, hngn.com; Cris Tolomia, “Senate narrowly rejected a bid to end the Iran war as midterm pressure mounted on GOP,” Quartz, September 25, 2026, qz.com; “U.S. Senate Defeats Iran War Powers Resolution on Vote of 49-50,” Democracy Now!, September 25, 2026, democracynow.org.
8. ↑ AlaaElDin and Hafezi, “Iran awaits U.S. move”; The Week, “Trump rejects Iran’s 7-day Hormuz proposal.”
9. ↑ Klein, “Report: Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Hormuz Proposal.”
10. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 507, vatican.va.
11. ↑ Pope John Paul II, Address to the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See (Vatican City, January 9, 1995), no. 7, vatican.va.
12. ↑ Maziar Motamedi, “Medicine shortages grow in Iran as US tightens sanctions, blockade,” Al Jazeera, September 9, 2026, aljazeera.com; Mostafa Salem, Leila Gharagozlou and Aida Karimi, “Trump’s sanctions, inflation and a collapsing economy leaves Iran’s sick exposed,” CNN via KVIA, September 20, 2026, kvia.com.
13. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 40, a. 1, and ad 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
14. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 192, vatican.va.
15. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 188, 218.

Books Cited

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)