“It’s Our Turn”: What the Church Says About a War Run on Reprisal

President Trump explained Wednesday afternoon why American aircraft were about to fly. “It’s our turn.” Eight hours later Central Command reported dozens of targets struck across southern Iran, and Iranian state media reported explosions on Qeshm Island, including one in a residential area. The reason given for the strikes was that Iran had gone first. That reason has been given by both governments, in alternation, for five months. Catholic teaching has a very old and very exact way of talking about the appetite hiding inside the word “turn,” and it does not flatter anybody.

The News Story

U.S. Central Command announced early Thursday that American forces had “successfully completed a heavy wave of strikes against Iran in response to yesterday’s attempted missile attacks on U.S. forces.” CENTCOM said its assets struck dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets, including military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, and maritime capabilities, in an operation it said was intended “to further diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces, commercial shipping, and neighboring Gulf countries.”^4,5

Iranian state media reported explosions across the country’s south. Press TV listed blasts at Bushehr, Abu Musa, Kish Island, Ahvaz and Qeshm Island. The semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported three explosions on Qeshm, including a strike on a residential area, and further explosions near the city of Kazerun. The deputy governor of Hormozgan province said U.S. forces were attacking areas surrounding Qeshm. Casualty figures were not immediately confirmed.⁴

The strikes followed an Iranian missile barrage that CENTCOM said was launched at 5:45 p.m. ET Tuesday. CENTCOM described it as an “attempted surprise attack” on U.S. forces in the Middle East and said all missiles were intercepted. The Revolutionary Guard said it had fired ballistic missiles at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a key U.S. hub. Jordan’s military said five Iranian missiles were “intercepted and destroyed,” with no reported casualties or damage.^12,1

President Donald Trump signaled the retaliation from the Oval Office on Wednesday. “It’s our turn, and we’ll see if we get there with an agreement at some point. But we’re going to hit them very hard,” he said, adding that all five Iranian rockets had been knocked down. He told Fox News that Iran was “going to get a beating.”^3,6,9–11

Separately, U.S. and Saudi aircraft struck what CENTCOM called “terrorist logistics and weapons sites” in eastern Iraq late Tuesday, the first offensive operations Saudi Arabia has acknowledged conducting during the conflict. The Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella of Iran-backed Iraqi militias formally under Iraqi military command, said at least 20 fighters were killed and 32 wounded, and that its Baghdad headquarters and six other sites were hit. Two Iraqi militia officials told the Associated Press that six Iranian advisers were among the dead. CENTCOM cited more than 30 attempted drone attacks on U.S. forces and Saudi energy sites over three days. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry called the strikes lawful self-defense. Iraqi President Nizar Amidi condemned them as “an unacceptable attack and a blatant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty,” and a planned visit to Riyadh by Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi was postponed indefinitely.²

Energy markets moved sharply. Brent crude rose 7.9% Wednesday to close at $90.74 a barrel, after briefly easing during a three-day lull. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it struck and halted three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, said Tehran had rejected an Omani proposal to divide traffic through the strait into two routes, saying Iran’s policy is that the waterway “never return to its prewar situation.”^7,8

The war began February 28 with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Trump at the White House Tuesday, their first meeting since.

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Word That Should Have Stopped the Room

Sit with one word in that Oval Office sentence. Turn.

A turn is a thing you have in a game. Cards, checkers, a board with squares on it. You take yours because the other fellow took his, and the rules guarantee you one. Nobody at a card table has to justify his turn. The justification is built into the structure. He went, so now you go.

That is the grammar currently being used to describe the killing of human beings across four countries. Iran fired at Muwaffaq Salti because the Americans had been bombing for weeks. The Americans bombed Bushehr and Qeshm because Iran fired at Muwaffaq Salti. The Saudis hit militia sites in Iraq because militias hit Saudi oil facilities. Every party in this war has, right now, a perfectly coherent account of why the last thing they did was somebody else’s fault. And every one of those accounts is true as a matter of sequence.

Catholic moral teaching does not accept sequence as a warrant. It never has. The Church has been willing at times to say that a particular use of arms was permissible, but she has never taught that “he went first” is by itself the reason. Something else has to be doing the work: an actual necessity, an actual proportion, an actual ordering toward the restoration of peace. Strip those away and what remains is the oldest human impulse there is, dressed up in the language of policy.

Anger Is a Desire for Revenge

The Catechism puts the impulse on the table in four words. “Anger is a desire for revenge.”¹⁴

The paragraph goes on with a distinction so fine that most people blow past it, and it is the distinction the whole week turns on. Quoting Saint Thomas, the Catechism says that “to desire vengeance in order to do evil to someone who should be punished is illicit,” while it is praiseworthy to impose restitution “to correct vices and maintain justice.”¹⁴ Two men can perform the identical outward act. One is aiming at a good, the restoration of some order that was broken. The other is aiming at the harm itself, at the satisfaction of seeing the other man hurt. The bombs look the same on the way down. The souls of the men who sent them are in completely different places.

So the question a Catholic has to ask about Thursday morning is not answerable from the target list. It is answerable, if at all, from the intention. And the public intention was stated out loud, twice, by the man who ordered it. Once as “it’s our turn.” Once, to Fox News, as a promise that Iran was “going to get a beating.”⁹

“A beating” is not the vocabulary of restitution. A beating is what you give somebody when the point is that he should suffer. I am not in a position to read the President’s heart, and neither is anybody else writing about this. But a nation is formed by the words its leaders use, and those words are teaching sixty million people that the moral case for an air campaign is that the other side has one coming. The Catechism goes on: “Deliberate hatred is contrary to charity. Hatred of the neighbor is a sin when one deliberately wishes him evil.”¹⁵ Then, in the same paragraph, our Lord, without softening: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”¹⁵

Notice that this obligation does not evaporate when the enemy is genuinely an enemy. The Revolutionary Guard did fire ballistic missiles at American servicemen this week. That is real. Three soldiers were killed at that same Jordanian base on July 17. Also real. The commandment was given to people who had real enemies. Christ was not describing a world in which nobody shoots at you.

Turn-Taking Has No Endpoint

Here is the practical problem with reprisal as a governing logic, and it is a problem of arithmetic before it is a problem of theology.

A war fought toward an objective can end, because objectives can be reached. A war fought in turns cannot end, because a turn always generates the next turn. Wednesday’s Iranian barrage was itself a response. Thursday’s American wave was a response to that. The Iranian response to Thursday will be along shortly, and it will be described, accurately, as a response. This is a machine with no stopping condition in it. Five months in, the parties are still explaining each move by pointing backward.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church locates peace somewhere the machine cannot reach. “The peace of Christ is in the first place reconciliation with the Father,” it says, and then, from that, reconciliation among brothers.¹³ Peace is a positive state with a cause. The Catechism says the same thing in different words: peace is not merely the absence of war, and it cannot be had by maintaining “a balance of powers between adversaries.”¹⁶ It requires safeguarding the goods of persons, free communication, respect for the dignity of persons and peoples, “and the assiduous practice of fraternity.”¹⁶ Peace, says the Catechism, is “the tranquility of order.”¹⁶

Turn-taking produces no order. It produces a rhythm, which is a very different thing, and the rhythm can go on until the munitions run out. Which, by the reporting, is roughly the condition the American air-defense stockpile is already approaching.

Leo XIV Answered This Exact Question About This Exact War

Catholics reaching for the just war checklist right now should know that the Holy Father has moved the ground under it, and that he has already applied his judgment to this particular conflict by name.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV wrote: “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.”¹⁷ That is a development in the Church’s teaching, and it is a real one. The classical framework worked out by Augustine and organized by Aquinas is not the operative instrument of Catholic moral analysis any longer. A more recent Magisterial document governs, and this is the more recent document. Anyone still running the four-point test from the Catechism and stopping there is using a tool the Pope has told us has been overtaken.

Then, in June, en route to Madrid, Leo was asked directly whether a just war was being waged in Iran. His answer: “I believe this has already been made very clear: In Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.”¹⁸

That is about as unambiguous as popes get. It was said before this week’s exchange, before the Saudis joined, before the first residential block on Qeshm was hit. Nothing that has happened since has made the case stronger.

Dialogue, Diplomacy, and Forgiveness Are the Tools He Names

Removing a framework without replacing it would be irresponsible, and Leo does not do that. In the same paragraph where he calls the just war theory outdated, he names what he considers “far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”¹⁹

Two of those three are already on the table and being refused. Oman proposed splitting transit through the Strait of Hormuz into two managed routes. Iran rejected it, and its deputy foreign minister said the policy is that the strait “never return to its prewar situation.” Mediators told the AP they are “still trying with both sides.” The Iranian foreign ministry says there are no negotiations with Washington at all. Diplomacy is not failing here for want of a mechanism. It is being declined, by parties who each believe another turn will improve their position.

The third tool is the one nobody wants to hear named in a policy discussion. Forgiveness. It sounds soft in a room where people are counting interceptors. Leo puts it in the same sentence as diplomacy on purpose, because the reason the diplomacy keeps collapsing is that both sides are carrying a ledger, and a ledger has to be either paid or forgiven before anyone can sit down. Five months of turns has made that ledger enormous.

Leo also has something to say that lands directly on how this particular war is being fought. He warns that new weapons systems make war more “feasible” and less subject to human control, and that this “violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense.”²⁰ And in a line that ought to be printed above every operations center on earth: “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.”²¹

The Residential Block on Qeshm Island

Tasnim reported that a residential area on Qeshm was hit by an American missile. One line in a wire story, no casualty figure attached, buried under the CENTCOM statement about command centers and coastal surveillance sites.

The Church has a rule that applies to that line regardless of how the war got started or whose turn it was. “The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties,” says the Catechism, quoting the Council.²² And immediately after: “Noncombatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.”²³

That rule binds Washington. It binds Tehran, which fired at an air base in a country that is not a party to this war and has watched five missiles come down over its territory in a single morning. It binds the Houthis, whose drones hit a Saudi refinery at Jazan and an oil processing plant at Abqaiq. None of them gets to invoke the other’s conduct as a release. This is the part of the moral law that survives the collapse of everything else, and the reason it survives is that the man living in that building on Qeshm never took a turn at anything.

Notice how the reprisal frame corrodes exactly this protection. When the reason for a strike is that it is our turn, the target set gets described in terms of who deserves it rather than what is necessary. CENTCOM said the aim was “to further diminish threats.” That is a defensible formula. “A beating,” which is what the President promised the day before, is not a formula that has any room in it for the family two streets over.

The Airman Still Owns What He Drops

There is a piece of the Compendium that almost never gets quoted in these arguments, and it belongs to the men in the cockpits rather than the men in the briefing rooms.

“Every member of the armed forces is morally obliged to resist orders that call for perpetrating crimes against the law of nations and the universal principles of this law,” the Compendium says, and then closes the escape hatch: “Military personnel remain fully responsible for the acts they commit in violation of the rights of individuals and peoples, or of the norms of international humanitarian law. Such acts cannot be justified by claiming obedience to the orders of superiors.”²⁵

The same document is careful to honor the vocation itself. “The requirements of legitimate defence justify the existence in States of armed forces, the activity of which should be at the service of peace. Those who defend the security and freedom of a country, in such a spirit, make an authentic contribution to peace.”²⁴ Everyone who serves is called, in the Compendium’s phrase, to defend good, truth and justice.

Both things are true at once, and holding them together is the actual Catholic position on the American aviators flying these missions. Their service can be a genuine good. Their conscience is still theirs. Nobody’s turn is transferable.

The Man You Are Being Taught to Enjoy Hating

I want to close somewhere uncomfortable, because this is where the teaching actually reaches the reader rather than the President.

Most of us will never authorize a strike. What we will do, over dinner and on our phones, is take sides, and take satisfaction. When the report came in that all five Iranian missiles were knocked down and the Americans were going to answer, a great many good Catholics felt something warm. When the word “beating” got quoted, a great many nodded. That feeling has a name in the Catechism, and the name is not patriotism. Anger is a desire for revenge.¹⁴ Wishing evil on a neighbor is a sin, and wishing him grave harm is a grave one.¹⁵

The men who serve the Revolutionary Guard batteries in Hormozgan province are, most of them, conscripts in their twenties. The men on the flight line in Jordan are, most of them, conscripts’ American equivalent, kids with a two-year enlistment and a girlfriend back home. Three of them are dead as of July 17. The Church asks you to pray for both sets, by name if you have names, and she does not offer an exemption for the set that is shooting at yours.

The Catechism says that those who renounce violence and bloodshed to safeguard human rights, using the means available to the weakest, “bear witness to evangelical charity.”²⁶ They give testimony, it says, to the gravity of the risks of recourse to violence, with all its destruction and death. That is a real vocation, open to laypeople, available today. It costs nothing but the surrender of the pleasure of the ledger.

Pray for the President, who has to make the call. Pray for the airmen, who have to fly it. Pray for the man on Qeshm, whose building came down for reasons he was never consulted about. And when the next barrage comes, and the argument on your screen is that it is somebody’s turn, remember that the Church has never once accepted that as a reason, and that the Holy Father has already told us plainly what he thinks about this war.

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Notes

1. ↑ Duarte Dias, “U.S.-Iran Updates: War Expands as U.S.-Saudi Strikes Target Iraqi Militias Backed by Iran,” CBS News, July 29, 2026, cbsnews.com.
2. ↑ Samy Magdy and Elena Becatoros, “Iran Resumes Missile Attacks as U.S. and Saudis Strike Tehran-Backed Militias in Iraq,” Associated Press, published by PBS NewsHour, July 29, 2026, pbs.org.
3. ↑ David Brennan and Nadine El-Bawab, “Iran Live Updates: US Begins Retaliatory Strikes Against Iran, CENTCOM Says,” ABC News, July 29, 2026, abcnews.com.
4. ↑ Esther Davis, “US CENTCOM Completes Strikes on Iran After Explosions Heard Across Country’s South,” The Jerusalem Post, July 30, 2026, jpost.com.
5. ↑ “US Hits Dozens of Targets in ‘Heavy Wave’ of Strikes Against Iran: CENTCOM,” ABC News, published by KVIA, July 29, 2026, kvia.com.
6. ↑ “Trump Says It’s ‘Our Turn’ After Intercepted Iranian Attack, US Completes Iran Strikes,” CNN, July 29, 2026, cnn.com.
7. ↑ “Brent Oil Jumps Back Above $90 After Trump Threatens to Hit Iran Hard,” CNBC, July 29, 2026, cnbc.com.
8. ↑ “U.S. Strikes Iran After Surprise Missile Attack, Dashing Hopes of De-escalation,” CNBC, July 30, 2026, cnbc.com.
9. ↑ “Trump Threatens to Expand Strikes on Iran, Says Power Plants Are Next to Go: ‘Hit Them Hard,’” Fox News, July 2026, foxnews.com.
10. ↑ “Trump Says US to Deliver ‘Beating’ to Iran After Bases Again Targeted,” Al Jazeera, July 29, 2026, aljazeera.com.
11. ↑ “US to Hit Iran Hard, Trump Tells Fox News After Jordan Base Attack,” Bloomberg, July 29, 2026, bloomberg.com.
12. ↑ Ben Finley, “Iran Launched Multiple Missiles at American Forces, U.S. Military Says,” Associated Press, published by PBS NewsHour, July 29, 2026, pbs.org.
13. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 492.
14. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2302, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, 158, 1 ad 3.
15. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2303.
16. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2304.
17. ↑ 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.
18. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, remarks to journalists en route to Madrid, June 6, 2026, quoted in Henry T. Edmondson III, “‘Magnifica Humanitas’ and the Just War Theory,” Word on Fire, July 17, 2026, wordonfire.org.
19. ↑ Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192.
20. ↑ Magnifica Humanitas, no. 197.
21. ↑ Magnifica Humanitas, no. 198.
22. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2312, quoting Gaudium et Spes, no. 79.
23. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2313.
24. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 502.
25. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 503.
26. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2306.

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, complete set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)