Iran named the operation. “Punishment of the Aggressor.” This is what the Revolutionary Guard called the missiles it sent into Jordan before dawn Monday. Washington had a name for its own strike the day before: limited, precise action to keep mines out of the Strait of Hormuz. Both phrases are intended to do the same job. Each one turns a blow into an answer for somebody else’s blow. That accounting is exactly where the Church says moral reasoning about war comes apart, and Pope Leo XIV said so again this past May.
The News Story
The United States and Iran exchanged direct military attacks over Sunday and early Monday, ending a month-long pause in open fighting in a war now entering its seventh month.
U.S. Central Command said American forces struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island, in the southern approaches of the Strait of Hormuz, on Sunday. A U.S. official told Axios the strike followed observation of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps preparations to launch rockets carrying sea mines into the waterway. Larak sits where the strait narrows to roughly 39 kilometers (24 miles) between the island and Oman’s Great Quoin Island. It was the first publicly acknowledged U.S. strike on Iranian positions since late July. CENTCOM said Monday that the operation was “limited, precise action” to prevent Iranian forces from laying mines, and rejected Iran’s characterization of it as an act of aggression. President Donald Trump had said earlier that Iran was notified that any ship or boat placing new mines would be “immediately and systematically destroyed.” CENTCOM said last week it had finished clearing mines from the strait’s international shipping lanes.
The IRGC said the Larak strike killed and injured an unspecified number of its fighters and Iranian citizens, and pledged “punishment of the aggressor.” Early Monday, it announced a combined missile and drone operation by that name against the King Hussein and Al Azraq air bases in Jordan, saying it had destroyed technical and repair infrastructure and fighter deployment sites. Jordan’s military said its air defense systems intercepted eight missiles that breached the kingdom’s airspace at dawn Monday. No injuries were reported at either base.
The IRGC further said it downed a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Strait of Hormuz, sending it into the Persian Gulf, and launched dozens of explosive drones at U.S. troops and helicopters at Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. Iranian state television reported missile launches from multiple locations, and Press TV reported fire directed at U.S. vessels in the strait, without further detail. Iranian state media also reported explosions in the southern city of Sirik. Senior Iranian lawmaker Ebrahim Azizi wrote on X, “Retaliation is coming; just run!” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran was “not looking for war.”
The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency said Sunday that a tanker was struck by an unknown projectile while transiting the strait. Iranian outlets reported a tanker caught fire after striking two mines. Attacks on shipping have been reported almost daily; Washington says millions of barrels are moving under U.S. naval protection, while Tehran maintains the waterway is closed. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi disputed U.S. accounts of oil volumes transiting the strait.
Oil rose on the news. Brent crude for November delivery gained about 1.5 percent to roughly $89.46 a barrel, and West Texas Intermediate for October gained about 1.4 percent to $84.60. AAA put the U.S. average price of gasoline at $4.08 a gallon, up from under $3 when the U.S. and Israel began the war in late February. The exchange came days after the Trump administration announced secondary sanctions aimed at isolating Iran financially, a shift toward economic pressure that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said does not rule out further military force.[1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
The Word Both Sides Are Using
Let us start with the timing, because it carries the whole argument.
Sunday, American forces hit two rocket launchers on Larak Island. CENTCOM says it acted after watching Revolutionary Guard crews prepare rockets carrying sea mines. By dawn Monday, Iranian ballistic missiles were over Jordan and Jordanian air defense crews were knocking eight of them out of the sky above their own country. Somewhere inside that same window, an American Reaper drone went into the Gulf, and explosive drones went at Al Minhad in the Emirates. From first shot to counter-shot: roughly 20 hours.
Neither government describes itself as having started anything. The IRGC statement calls the American action “aggression” and promises that “every attack will be met with even more devastating responses.” CENTCOM calls its own operation “limited, precise action” and puts the blame on Tehran. Two governments, one grammar. Each side gets to be the one who answered.
You’ve heard this grammar your whole life. It runs on a ledger. Somebody hit first, so the second hit is covered. And once both parties can point backward to a prior blow, the ledger never closes, because there’s always an earlier entry.
The Strike That Came First
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church has a sentence that speaks to the events of Sunday. “Engaging in a preventive war without clear proof that an attack is imminent cannot fail to raise serious moral and juridical questions.”[2] It adds that any exercise of self-defense has to respect “the traditional limits of necessity and proportionality,” and that international legitimacy for using armed force belongs to a competent body making a rigorous assessment.
Notice where the Compendium puts the bar. Clear proof that an attack is imminent. That standard is written in the language of proof, and proof is a demanding word. Rockets rigged with mines, sitting on launchers, aimed at a shipping lane 24 miles wide is a serious fact, and I’m not in a position from Omaha to grade classified imagery. But “we have watched them do this before” is a different claim than “an attack is imminent,” and a government that blurs the two has slid from defense into policy.
Sunday’s blow does not license Monday’s. The Compendium is blunt about that: “Nor does the mere fact that war has unfortunately broken out mean that all is fair between the warring parties.”[3] Jordan didn’t attack anybody. Jordan’s air defense crews spent the pre-dawn hours defending Jordanian airspace from missiles fired by one belligerent at another belligerent’s bases. Whatever the Larak strike was, the eight missiles over Amman were not proportionate to it, and they were not aimed at the party that fired.
Why Leo XIV Says The Ledger No Longer Balances
Here is where a Catholic has to be careful. Augustine and Aquinas built the just war tradition, and it was a genuine achievement, written to restrain war by making it hard to justify. But in Magnifica Humanitas, published this May, 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.”[4] That is a development in the Church’s teaching, and it governs. A Catholic in 2026 does not reach first for the Thomistic checklist and start ticking boxes.
Leo’s reason is worth hearing, because it describes this week exactly. He laments that war has been “revived as an instrument of international politics, while the very ethical principles that had previously limited its use are being eroded.”[5] An instrument of politics is a thing you reach for on a Sunday afternoon because it produces an effect, and then the other party reaches for it by Monday morning because it also produces an effect. Anyone managing a relationship with ordnance on that clock has stopped weighing lasting, grave and certain damage against serious prospects of success. There isn’t time, and the old checklist assumed there would be.
The Compendium made the same point in flatter language 20 years earlier. War “is never an appropriate way to resolve problems that arise between nations; it has never been, and it will never be, because it creates new and still more complicated conflicts.”[6] Read that last clause against the last 24 hours. The strike on Larak produced Iranian dead, which produced missiles over Jordan, which produced Jordanian interceptors, which produced a downed American drone and drones over the Emirates. Six months in, the war has generated more parties, more airspace, and more grievances than it began with. The Compendium is describing a mechanism, and the mechanism is running.
Leo also names the alternative rather than leaving a hole. “Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness. The use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.”[7] Relational poverty is a striking phrase from a pope. It says force is what’s left when a relationship has run out of anything else, and that the people who pay for that poverty are almost never the ones who ran out.
Where This Leaves A Catholic In America
For most of us in America, the only part of this war we touch is the pump, and it read $4.08 on Saturday, up from under $3 in February. That number is real, and it hurts families I know. It’s also the most dangerous way to think about the war, because it invites us to grade a moral question by its effect on our own budget, and to want whatever ends the price spike fastest.
The Compendium closes that door in six words: “Violence is never a proper response.”[8] It goes on: violence “destroys what it claims to defend: the dignity, the life, the freedom of human beings.” Iranian fighters and civilians died on Larak Island Sunday. Jordanian crews stood at radar screens before dawn Monday with minutes to decide whether the tracks on their screen would hit their own soil. None of them chose this, and none of them will be consulted about how it ends.
So the practical thing I’d ask of you is to refuse the ledger. When you hear “they started it,” which you will hear from both directions this week, put a different question next to it: did this blow do anything except purchase the next one? Ask it about the Larak strike. Ask it about the missiles over Amman. Ask it out loud, to the person across from you at the table, because the language of tit-for-tat only holds up when nobody interrupts it.
And pray for the people in the Strait of Hormuz who are neither Iranian nor American: the merchant crews on tankers hit by mines and projectiles almost daily now, the Jordanians, the Emiratis, the Omanis living beside a 24-mile channel that two governments are using as a message board. They are the ones Leo had in mind when he wrote about relational poverty and its consequences for civilian populations. Six months in, they are still there, and the war is still explaining itself as a series of replies.
This story turns on the Church’s teaching that violence is never a proper response.
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Footnotes
- “Iran Attacks US Bases in Jordan After US Strikes Larak Island,” Al Jazeera, August 30, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Iran War Live: IRGC Attacks US Bases in Jordan After US Bombs Larak Island,” Al Jazeera, August 31, 2026, aljazeera.com; Fatma Zehra Solmaz, “Morning Briefing: Aug. 31, 2026,” Anadolu Agency, August 31, 2026, aa.com.tr; “US Strikes Iranian Launchers on Larak Island, Marking First Attacks in Weeks,” Anadolu Agency, August 31, 2026, aa.com.tr; “Iran Says It Targeted US Forces at UAE Air Base with Explosive Drones,” Anadolu Agency, August 31, 2026, aa.com.tr; “Iran Says It Downed US Drone over Strait of Hormuz,” Anadolu Agency, August 31, 2026, aa.com.tr; “Iran’s Pezeshkian Says Tehran ‘Not Looking for War’ after US Attack on Larak Island,” Anadolu Agency, August 31, 2026, aa.com.tr; “US and Iran Trade Attacks, Marking First Escalation in a Month,” CNN, August 30, 2026, cnn.com; “US Forces Strike Iranian Missile Launchers as IRGC Prepares Rockets, Sea Mines in Strait of Hormuz,” Fox News, August 30, 2026, foxnews.com; “U.S. Strikes Iranian Rocket Launchers near Strait of Hormuz,” CNBC, August 30, 2026, cnbc.com; “Oil Rises over 1% after U.S. Forces Strike Two Iranian Rocket Launchers on Larak Island,” CNBC, August 31, 2026, cnbc.com; “US Strikes Iranian Military as Sea Mines Approach Strait of Hormuz,” Newsweek, August 30, 2026, newsweek.com; “Iran Fires Missiles at US Base in Jordan after Larak Island Strikes,” Gulf News, August 31, 2026, gulfnews.com. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 501. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 500, quoting Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, no. 79. ↩
- Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas (May 15, 2026), quoted in Javier Romero, “Can Wars Still Be Just? Pope Leo XIV Addresses the Issue in ‘Magnifica Humanitas,'” ACI Prensa/EWTN News, National Catholic Register, May 29, 2026, ncregister.com. ↩
- Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, quoted in Romero, “Can Wars Still Be Just?” ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 497. ↩
- Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, quoted in Josephine Peterson, “Encyclical: What Pope Leo Thinks about ‘Just War’ Theory, Historic Church Apology for Slavery,” Catholic News Service, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, May 26, 2026, usccb.org. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 496, quoting John Paul II, Address at Drogheda, Ireland (September 29, 1979), no. 9. ↩
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