Dozens of missiles and drones came over the Saudi border before dawn Tuesday and set fire to oil facilities in four cities. The Houthis said the strikes answered Saudi airstrikes in Yemen. Riyadh said it would answer the Houthis. Behind both of them stand bigger powers who built the missiles, sold the jets, and set the terms of a war that has now killed or wounded at least 728 people in 17 days. I want to look at the question that sits under it all: when a war is fought through other people’s hands, whose hands does the Church hold responsible?
The News Story
Yemen’s Houthi movement fired dozens of ballistic missiles and drones into southern Saudi Arabia early Tuesday, igniting fires at oil installations and utilities and wounding 73 people, in the heaviest attack on the kingdom since the conflict reignited this summer.
Maj. Gen. Turki al-Malki, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said the strikes hit civilian and economic facilities in Abha, Jazan, Najran and Khamis Mushait, and that women and children were among the wounded. He called the attacks a serious escalation and “a flagrant violation of the kingdom’s sovereignty,” and said the coalition would take all necessary operational measures to deter the Houthis. Saudi Arabia’s Energy Ministry said operations at several oil facilities and utilities were temporarily suspended while firefighters worked through Tuesday morning. The southern region holds the Jazan refinery, which processes 400,000 barrels of crude a day and is one of the kingdom’s largest.
Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, the Houthi military spokesman, claimed responsibility in a prerecorded video, describing a broad operation against Aramco sites in Najran and Abha, the Jazan City for Primary and Downstream Industries complex on the Red Sea coast, and King Khalid Air Base at Khamis Mushait. He said the strikes answered recent Saudi attacks across Yemen. NASA satellite imagery distributed by Reuters showed a thick cloud of black smoke over the Jazan refinery and a column of white smoke rising from an oil distribution center at Abha. Saudi authorities released no images of the aftermath, and reporters could not independently reach witnesses in the kingdom.
The attacks followed Houthi accusations that a Saudi airstrike hit a prison in al-Hazm, the capital of al-Jawf province, killing seven people, including a child, and wounding seven more. Riyadh did not comment on that strike. Houthi-run media later reported four Saudi airstrikes in the Jubah district east of Sanaa.
Oil markets moved fast. Brent crude touched roughly $99 a barrel on Tuesday, its highest level since mid-July, and West Texas Intermediate rose more than 2.7% to above $94. Prices are up more than 8% this month as the United States and Iran have traded fire again. The Bab al-Mandeb strait, which carried an average of 4.1 million barrels a day in 2024, about 5% of world supply, has taken on added weight because Iran’s restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz pushed Saudi exports toward the Red Sea route.
Ground fighting widened at the same time. Yemen’s internationally recognized government, led by Presidential Leadership Council chairman Rashad al-Alimi, announced counteroffensives Monday in al-Jawf, al-Bayda, Taiz and Hodeidah, and Deputy Defense Minister Maj. Gen. Samir al-Sabri said the government intends to retake Sanaa. The Houthis said they repelled the push toward the al-Labanat mountains. Neither side’s battlefield claims could be independently verified.
The World Health Organization said at least 728 people have been killed or wounded in Yemen since August 23, most of them in Taiz and along the west coast, and that roughly 21,000 people have been displaced from Taiz. The International Organization for Migration counted about 18,500 displaced across Taiz and Hodeidah. The 2022 UN-brokered truce collapsed in July after a coalition strike on the Sanaa airport runway blocked an Iranian aircraft from landing.[1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Every Weapon In This War Came From Somewhere Else
Start with the weapons, because the weapons tell you who’s in the room. The Houthis don’t build ballistic missiles. UN experts have documented for years that the missiles and drones coming out of Yemen are Iranian designs, assembled from Iranian parts, and CNBC’s headline on Tuesday simply called the attackers “Iran’s Houthi allies.” The Saudi coalition doesn’t build its jets either. The aircraft over al-Jawf and the bombs they carry come, for the most part, from the United States and Britain, and the ground offensive announced Monday moves on coalition money and coalition air cover. Even the truce died by proxy: it collapsed in July over a strike on a runway meant to stop an Iranian plane from landing.
So every hand on a trigger in this war is holding something somebody else made, paid for, and shipped. And the somebody else, in each case, is a government that would prefer you think of the fighting as a local quarrel between Yemenis and Saudis. I want to test that preference against the Church’s teaching, because the Church has a precise answer, and that answer is older than any of these governments.
The Four Ways You Share In Somebody Else’s Sin
The Catechism, in its treatment of sin, states the rule in one paragraph. “Sin is a personal act. Moreover, we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them: by participating directly and voluntarily in them; by ordering, advising, praising, or approving them; by not disclosing or not hindering them when we have an obligation to do so; by protecting evil-doers.”[2]
Read that list against Tuesday. The crew that launched a drone at a utility plant in Abha participated directly. Whoever in Sanaa or Tehran signed off on the target list ordered or approved. The capitals that could restrain a client and chose to keep shipping instead failed to hinder when they had an obligation to. And the diplomats who will spend this week explaining why their side’s strikes are replies, and the other side’s are aggression are, in the Catechism’s plain phrase, protecting evil-doers. The list was written for the confessional. It fits a war room without changing a word.
The next paragraph draws the consequence: “Thus sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them.”[3] Accomplices is a strong word, and the Church uses it on purpose. A proxy arrangement is designed to keep the sponsor’s name off the act. The Catechism refuses the arrangement. The name stays on.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church carries the same rule into the life of nations. It explains that structures of sin “are rooted in personal sin and, therefore, are always connected to concrete acts of the individuals who commit them, consolidate them and make it difficult to remove them,” and it names the two appetites that build such structures today: “the all-consuming desire for profit” and “the thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one’s will upon others.”[4] Yemen’s war has run on both since 2015. Somebody profits from every missile the Houthis fire and every bomb the coalition drops, and somebody’s will is being imposed on 21,000 people who left Taiz with what they could carry.
Arms Are Never Ordinary Goods
The Compendium then gets specific about weapons, and this is where the sponsor’s defense collapses. The principle of sufficiency, it says, “by virtue of which each State may possess only the means necessary for its legitimate defense, must be applied both by States that buy arms and by those that produce and furnish them.” Then a sentence I’d like printed on the wall of every export-licensing office: “Arms can never be treated like other goods exchanged on international or domestic markets.”[5]
Both by those who buy and those who furnish. The Church wrote the supplier into the moral equation 22 years ago. A government that sells a missile has a share in where the missile lands. That’s the whole teaching, and it has no exception clause for allies.
Pope Leo XIV said the same thing this May with less diplomacy. In Magnifica Humanitas he describes an “armed nation” in which “the arms market becomes an autonomous driving force behind military decisions,” and then he names the beneficiaries: “The armaments industry, and countries that supply weapons, profit from a market that thrives precisely on conflicts.”[6] Countries that supply weapons. He doesn’t say which ones, and he doesn’t have to. Anyone reading Tuesday’s story can fill in the blanks from both sides of the Bab al-Mandeb.
Why The Old Checklist Can’t See The Supplier
The classical just war theory asked whether a given war had a just cause, legitimate authority, and proportionate means. It’s a checklist built for a sovereign deciding whether to march. It has almost no line for the power that never marches, that arms someone else to march and then deplores the results. Leo XIV, in the same encyclical, says plainly that the just war theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” and adds that “the use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.”[7]
I take the Holy Father at his word. The point for this story is that Leo’s framework widens the lens until the supplier is inside it. A just war checklist could let Washington or Tehran grade Tuesday’s strike as somebody else’s decision. Leo won’t. The relational poverty he names is exactly the relationship between a sponsor and a client: I give you the weapon, you take the blame.
What Neutrality Costs
A second passage in Magnifica Humanitas reads as if it were written for this week. “In some conflicts,” Leo writes, “it is unjust to remain neutral, nor is it enough merely to claim that we are not complicit. When we witness the bombing of civilians, attacks on hospitals, schools or vital infrastructure, and violence that affects children, we are confronted with scandals that wound humanity itself.”[8]
Vital infrastructure. The Houthis put missiles into utilities and a refinery that keeps a region running. The coalition, by the Houthis’ account, put a bomb into a prison and killed a child. Both belong on the list Leo wrote. And his sentence cuts off the escape hatch that every sponsor of a proxy war depends on: the claim that we’re not complicit. The Pope closes that door. A sponsor has to look at what its weapons did and take a stand.
The Part That Lands On Us
I’ll say the uncomfortable part. The United States is a supplier to the Saudi coalition, is at war with the Houthis’ patron, and noticed Tuesday’s attack mostly because Brent crude touched $99. That’s the frame the news gave you: oil up 8% this month. The Church gives you a different one. If our government furnished the bombs, then by the Catechism’s own list we are somewhere on it, probably at “not hindering when we have an obligation to do so.”
What obligation? Leo XIV describes solidarity as something a citizen does, “by staying informed, engaging with others, making their voice heard and contributing to public decisions and choices.”[9] In a republic, the hindering happens through you. You can ask your representative what conditions come attached to the weapons we ship. You can decline to accept “it’s a reply” as a moral argument, from either side. You can pray for the people of Taiz by name at Mass on Sunday, which is a small thing, and also the thing that keeps a war from becoming a line on a commodities chart.
No one fires a missile alone. The Church has known that since she first told a penitent that approving a sin is a way of committing it. Tuesday’s fires burned in Saudi Arabia, but the hands that lit them reach a long way back, and the Catechism follows them all the way.
This story turns on cooperation in evil: the Church’s teaching that we answer for the sins of others when we supply, approve, or fail to hinder them.
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Footnotes
- “Houthi Attacks on Saudi Arabia Ignite Fires at Oil Facilities and Wound 73 People,” NPR (Associated Press), September 8, 2026, npr.org; “Saudi-Houthi Fighting in Yemen Escalates: What Happened, and What’s Next?,” Al Jazeera, September 8, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Yemen’s Houthis Attack Four Saudi Arabian Cities, Including Oil Facilities, in Expansion of Middle East War,” ABC News (Reuters/AP), September 9, 2026, abc.net.au; “Brent Crude Oil Hits $98 After Iran’s Houthi Allies Attack Multiple Saudi Energy Facilities,” CNBC, September 8, 2026, cnbc.com; “Oil Nears $100 on Reports of New U.S. Strike in Iran and Attacks on Saudi Infrastructure,” NBC News, September 8, 2026, nbcnews.com; “Oil Prices Approaching $100 per Barrel as Houthis Attack Saudi Sites,” UPI, September 8, 2026, upi.com; “More Than 300 Fighters Killed in Yemen Clashes Over Last 4 Days, Amid Houthi Offensive,” The Times of Israel, September 8, 2026, timesofisrael.com; “How Significant Are the Yemeni Government’s Military Gains Against Houthis?,” Al Jazeera, September 6, 2026, aljazeera.com. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1868, vatican.va. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1869. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 119, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 508. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), no. 193, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 216. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 73. ↩
Books Cited
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- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
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