President Trump said Tuesday that the United States is planning to strike a fortified underground site near one of Iran’s main uranium-enrichment facilities. That same night, Iranian state media reported a U.S. strike on an electrical installation close to the nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Taken together, these two facts present the most serious moral question this war has raised so far. The question is not whether the United States may defend itself; the Church has always recognized that right. The question is what a nation may do in the name of that defense. There is a kind of harm that cannot be aimed, and the Church has been warning against it since long before the first reactor was built.

The News Story

The war between the United States and Iran escalated sharply over the past 24 hours, with U.S. forces carrying out their eleventh consecutive night of airstrikes on Iran while Iran struck back at American military targets across the Gulf and in Jordan. The renewed fighting followed the collapse of a 60-day ceasefire brokered in mid-June, and it pushed oil prices higher and drew a second critical waterway into the conflict.

U.S. Central Command said it targeted Iranian military operations centers, maritime capabilities, aircraft hangars, drone storage facilities, and military logistics infrastructure, describing the strikes as an effort to degrade Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes. Iranian state media reported explosions across seven provinces and said one strike hit an electrical installation near the Bushehr nuclear power plant. President Trump told reporters Tuesday the U.S. was planning to hit a fortified underground site near one of Iran’s main uranium-enrichment facilities; Iran warned that an attack on nuclear or “other sensitive facilities” would be a major escalation.

Iran said it again targeted a base in eastern Jordan where three U.S. personnel were killed last week, and struck the Sheikh Isa air base in Bahrain, a hub for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Jordan said it intercepted six Iranian missiles Wednesday. The Pentagon identified the third service member killed in Jordan as Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, N.Y., bringing U.S. war deaths to 18. Iran’s government says roughly 3,000 people in Iran, many of them civilians, have been killed since the war began.

A new front opened when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels declared the Bab el-Mandeb strait, a Red Sea passage vital to Saudi Arabia’s oil exports, off limits to that country and warned international shipping to avoid it. The Houthi-run news agency said six ships changed course after the warning, and commercial trackers reported several tankers loaded with Saudi crude backing out of the waterway. Oil prices rose again, with benchmark crude topping $92 a barrel after Iran attacked a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz.

On Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified that the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, as the White House sought roughly $90 billion in additional funding, mostly for military operations. Diplomatic efforts continued in parallel, with Iranian Interior Minister Eskander Momeni visiting Pakistan, a mediator, for talks aimed at potentially reviving the collapsed ceasefire. Trump said Iran wants “to meet desperately” but that “until they’re ready to meet in a meaningful way, we have no interest.” [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

A nuclear power plant against a clear sky. The story turns on a threatened strike near Iran’s Bushehr plant and its enrichment sites. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 334851608.

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Church does not approach war as a pacifist, nor does she approach it as a hawk. She begins with the nation that has been attacked. Iran and the United States have been trading fire for months, and 18 American families have now buried a loved one. A government whose people are under attack has a true duty to protect them. The Catechism treats this duty with great care and sobriety. It lists the conditions under which military force may be used, and the final condition is the one that matters most in this moment: “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.” [8] It is worth pausing over that final sentence. The Church built a warning about modern weapons directly into the very rule that permits defense. She anticipated the reactor long before it was built.

The question, then, is not whether the United States may act. The question is what an act against a nuclear site actually does. Here the whole architecture of Catholic teaching on war converges on a single point.

The proportionality condition deserves careful attention, because it does real work in this situation. The Catechism does not say that force must merely produce more good than harm on some ledger. It says the arms used “must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated,” and it then singles out modern weapons as the thing most likely to exceed that limit. [8] A commander weighing a strike on Bushehr or on a buried enrichment hall is weighing exactly this condition. The evil to be eliminated is a nuclear program that might, someday, produce a weapon. The evil that might be produced is a radiological release, today, over a real population living downwind. When the possible harm is so unbalanced in time and in certainty, near-term and physical on one side, future and hypothetical on the other, the proportionality condition is not a close call. It weighs heavily against the strike. The Church wrote that weight into the rule deliberately.

The Line The Church Drew Before The Bomb

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church is the Church’s own organized summary of everything she teaches about society, and on the subject of war it does not hedge. It quotes the hard judgment that “it is hardly possible to imagine that in an atomic era, war could be used as an instrument of justice.” [9] War, it says, is “the failure of all true humanism,” and “always a defeat for humanity.” [10] That is strong language from a document that still allows legitimate defense. The Church holds both truths at once. A nation may defend itself, and war remains a catastrophe that solves almost nothing and breeds new conflicts. Anyone who has watched a mid-June ceasefire collapse into an eleventh night of strikes can recognize the truth of that second claim.

The sharpest teaching, however, is older and more direct. The Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council, states it plainly: “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” [11] It then adds a warning that could have been written for this very week: “A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons, especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons, to commit such crimes.” [11]

It is important to notice precisely what the Church condemns. She does not condemn the size of the bomb. The key word is “indiscriminate.” She condemns force that cannot distinguish a soldier from a schoolgirl, force whose harm spreads beyond the target and falls upon whoever happens to be downwind. This is the whole moral problem with striking a nuclear facility. A missile may be aimed with great precision. What comes after it cannot be aimed at all. A damaged reactor or a strike on an enrichment site does not release its harm along the flight path of the weapon. It releases it on the wind, into the water table, and into the lungs of farmers and children who were never combatants and never will be. This is the harm you cannot aim. The Church condemned it by name generations before the first centrifuge spun in Natanz.

Weapons Of Mass Destruction, And The Facilities That Become Them

The Compendium goes further and names the category directly. “Arms of mass destruction, whether biological, chemical or nuclear, represent a particularly serious threat. Those who possess them have an enormous responsibility before God and all of humanity.” [12] This teaching is usually read as a rule about who may hold such weapons. But it also says something about who may release their contents upon the world. A nuclear reactor or an enrichment plant contains exactly the material the Church calls a particularly serious threat. To bomb such a facility is not to destroy a weapon of mass destruction. It is to detonate one by proxy, using the enemy’s own facility as the delivery system and the local population as the target it was never supposed to have.

Fairness requires presenting the strongest version of the opposing argument, because a serious Catholic owes that much to those with whom he disagrees. The case for striking the enrichment site runs as follows. Iran is at war with the United States. A nuclear-armed Iran would threaten millions. It is better to strike the program now, at some risk, than to allow it to finish and face a far graver risk later. This is not a frivolous argument. It takes seriously, the duty to protect the innocent, a duty the Church also takes seriously. The Compendium insists that the right to use force “is associated with the duty to protect and help innocent victims who are not able to defend themselves from acts of aggression.” [13]

Yet the argument still fails on the Church’s own terms. The duty to protect the innocent cannot be discharged by a means that predictably kills a different set of innocents. The Compendium, in the very next breath, warns that “far too often, the civilian population is hit and at times even becomes a target of war,” and it calls this always unacceptable. [13] It then states the principle without any exception: there is an “obligation to protect civil populations from the effects of war,” and that minimum protection of human dignity is “all too often violated in the name of military or political demands which should never prevail over the value of the human person.” [14] Military demands “should never prevail.” Not rarely, not usually. Never. The moment one says the strategic prize is worth the radiological harm to civilians, one has allowed a military demand to prevail over persons, and the Church has already shown where that reasoning ends.

Everything Does Not Become Licit

There is a temptation in a long and ugly war to conclude that the gloves have come off, that the other side started it, and that anything goes now. The Catechism closes that door firmly. “The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.” [15] The moral law does not take a leave of absence when the shooting starts. And the Catechism names the protected class directly: “Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.” [16]

This is where the war’s own record should give everyone pause. Iran says roughly 3,000 people have died on its soil, many of them civilians. One piece of this conflict’s history deserves particular attention: the report that 168 students and teachers were killed at an elementary girls’ school in southern Iran in February, in a strike the U.S. military says it is still investigating. Whatever the investigation finds, the possibility alone is the reason the Church’s rule exists. Once one accepts that a sufficiently important target justifies indiscriminate harm, the schoolhouse and the reactor sit on the same slope, and the descent is swift. The non-combatant is not an obstacle to be regretted. She is a person whose dignity outranks the objective. Every objective.

Leo XIV And The End Of “Just War” As A Loophole

For centuries Catholics have reached for Just War theory, the framework refined by Saint Thomas Aquinas and others, to test whether a particular war can be waged rightly. Aquinas remains a treasure of the Church. But the Church’s teaching is a living thing, and where a more recent voice of the Magisterium develops the question, that newer voice governs. Pope Leo XIV, in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, has argued that the classical Just War Theory is outdated and must be treated as superseded in the Church’s moral analysis of war and peace. The Holy Father’s concern is precisely the one running through this entire analysis. The old theory was worked out for a world of swords and siege lines, where the harm of battle stayed roughly where it was placed. That world is gone. In an age of enrichment plants and warheads, the tidy checklist can become a permission slip, a way to bless as “proportionate” a strike whose real effects no general can contain.

The old Just War checklist, then, cannot settle this question. The Church’s current mind, read through Leo XIV and the whole modern corpus, is more demanding. It presses relentlessly toward the protection of the person and toward peace as the actual goal, not war as a tool of policy. When the Compendium says it is “hardly possible to imagine that in an atomic era, war could be used as an instrument of justice,” it is not being sentimental. [9] It is teaching that the means we now possess have outrun our ability to use them justly, and that a strike on a nuclear site stands at the outer edge of what the tradition can even attempt to justify.

The Road The Church Actually Points Down

None of this leaves us with a shrug. The Church is not merely against things. She points somewhere. The Compendium proposes, as a positive goal, “general, balanced and controlled disarmament,” governed by the principle of sufficiency, by which “each State may possess only the means necessary for its legitimate defense.” [17] The whole trajectory of the teaching runs away from escalation and toward the negotiating table. This is why the small item near the bottom of today’s news matters more than its placement suggests. An Iranian minister flew to Pakistan for talks aimed at reviving the collapsed ceasefire. That is the direction the Church has been pointing the entire time.

Set that against the President’s public posture. He says the Iranians “want to meet desperately” but that “until they’re ready to meet in a meaningful way, we have no interest.” Read as strategy, perhaps that is a bargaining posture. Read through the Catechism, it should trouble us, because the Church warns that the accumulation and use of ever-greater force “does not ensure peace” and instead “risks aggravating” the causes of war and “multiplies reasons for conflict.” [18] Eleven nights of strikes have not reopened the Strait of Hormuz. They have closed a second waterway, pushed crude past $92, and added Sgt. Rampersad’s name to a list that keeps growing. The teaching predicted exactly this. Force that aims at domination rather than at a just and stable peace tends to breed the next war inside the present one.

There is one more thread the Church would not let us drop, and it runs through the dullest line in today’s coverage. Secretary Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion, and the White House is asking for roughly $90 billion more. Numbers that large grow numb quickly. The Catechism refuses to let them. In the same passage that warns the arms race breeds war, it adds a sentence about who pays: “Spending enormous sums to produce ever new types of weapons impedes efforts to aid needy populations; it thwarts the development of peoples.” [19] Ninety billion dollars is not an abstraction. It is schools not built, clinics not staffed, and hungry people not fed, on both sides of this war and far beyond it. Every escalation writes a check the poor must cash. The Church keeps her eye on that ledger even when the cameras are pointed at the missiles. A strike on a nuclear site is expensive in a way no appropriations bill will ever capture, and the bill still comes due, first to the farmer downwind, then to the child whose clinic money went to the next round of ordnance.

The conclusion the Church leads us to is clear. A precise weapon aimed at an imprecise catastrophe is still an imprecise catastrophe. The plan to strike Iran’s nuclear and enrichment sites, whatever its strategic logic, runs directly against the oldest and clearest thing the Church teaches about war: one may not choose a means whose harm cannot be aimed. Defense is a duty. So is the refusal to become, in the name of defense, the very thing one claims to be stopping. The Church asks the harder and better question tonight. Not how to win this war, but how to stop it before someone opens a reactor to the sky and calls it justice.

Pray for the 18 American families. Pray for the 3,000 in Iran. And pray for the men in Pakistan trying to talk, because on the Church’s reading of this war, they are the only ones doing something that could truly be called defense.

---

Footnotes

1. Jane Arraf, “U.S. and Iranian Attacks Continue as Tensions Mount on a Key Waterway in the Red Sea,” NPR, July 22, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/22/nx-s1–5902843/us-iran-updates.
2. “Amid U.S.-Iran War, Houthis Declare a Blockade of Another Key Strait: Bab el-Mandeb,” NPR, July 21, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/21/nx-s1–5901846/us-iran-updates.
3. “Pete Hegseth Testifies at Hearing on Iran Funding, Says War Cost $37.5 Billion,” CNN, July 21, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/21/world/live-news/iran-war-trump.
4. “Red Sea Blockade Threatens New Front in U.S.-Iran War,” The Washington Post, July 21, 2026, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/07/21/red-sea-blockade-threatens-new-front-us-iran-war/.
5. “Hegseth Requests More Funding for Iran War and Zelenskyy Fires His Commander in Chief,” NBC News, July 22, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hegseth-funding-iran-war-zelenskyy-fires-syrskyi-morning-rundown-rcna588656.
6. “Oil Prices Jump as US and Iran Trade Attacks Over Strait of Hormuz,” Al Jazeera, July 13, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/7/13/oil-prices-jump-as-us-and-iran-trade-attacks-over-strait-of-hormuz.
7. “2026 Iran War,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed July 23, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/event/2026-Iran-war.
8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2309.
9. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 497.
10. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 497.
11. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2314.
12. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 509.
13. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 504.
14. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 505.
15. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2312.
16. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2313.
17. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 508.
18. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2315.
19. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2315.

Central Command released a statement Saturday saying two American service members were killed in action in Jordan, and that a third is missing. The names are being withheld until families are told. So right now, somewhere in this country, there are households that don’t yet know, and there is one family that will be told their son or daughter is unaccounted for, which is its own particular kind of wound. The Church has a great deal to say about the man in that uniform, and almost none of it gets quoted when a war is running. Let me quote it.

The News Story

Two U.S. service members were killed in action, and a third is missing after an Iranian ballistic missile and drone attack on U.S. and partner forces in Jordan, U.S. Central Command announced Saturday, as the war between the United States and Iran widened across the Persian Gulf and the fight for control of the Strait of Hormuz intensified.[1]

CENTCOM said the attack occurred Friday and that four additional troops were medically evacuated to hospitals in Jordan and have since been discharged. Other personnel evaluated for minor injuries returned to duty. The command said it would withhold the identities of the dead until 24 hours after next of kin are notified, and did not disclose the exact location of the strike. Military Times reported the losses bring the American death toll in the conflict to 16; the Associated Press reported Saturday that 14 U.S. service members had been killed and 427 wounded since fighting began February 28.[2]

The casualties came as CENTCOM completed what it described as a seventh consecutive night of strikes on Iran, followed by an eighth overnight into Sunday. The command said U.S. forces used fighter aircraft, aerial drones, warships and other assets to hit “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities,” and that it “continues to hold Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief’s direction while fully enforcing a naval blockade against Iranian ports.” CENTCOM said more than 50,000 American service members are operating across the Middle East.[3][4]

Iranian state television reported U.S. strikes on highway and railway bridges in Hormozgan province near Bandar Khamir, apparently aimed at severing Iran’s main port at Bandar Abbas from routes inland toward Tehran. Iran acknowledged attacks on power infrastructure for the first time Friday, when its Energy Ministry urged residents of southern provinces facing extreme heat to conserve electricity. Iranian authorities said at least 46 people had been killed and more than 400 wounded in recent U.S. strikes; Iran’s Health Ministry put the July toll at more than 50 killed and over 500 injured.[5][6]

Iranian retaliation struck U.S. partners across the Gulf. Kuwait’s army said it intercepted ballistic missiles and drones and reported damage to oil, electricity, and water facilities, including a power and desalination plant. Roughly 90 percent of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from desalination. The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said a “vital” oil-sector site sustained severe damage and injuries. Bahrain’s defense force said it destroyed multiple incoming Iranian attacks Saturday. Jordan said it downed ten Iranian missiles, and Iraq reported shooting down drones over Irbil. Qatar, a mediator in the conflict, was targeted Friday; falling debris wounded a child.[7][8]

Iran has effectively closed the strait since the war began and says the waterway must be under its sole control, with vessels paying fees to Tehran. Crossings fell to a three-week low of eight vessels Thursday, according to MarineTraffic. Brent crude rose above $86 a barrel Friday. President Trump, who addressed the nation Thursday, said, “We are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.”[9]

One grave, one name, at Arlington National Cemetery. The Church’s teaching on war begins with the individual person under that stone, not with the strategy that put him there. Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 199610781.

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The One Who Is Missing

Start with the third one. Two are dead, and their families will be told within a day, and that grief, terrible as it is, has an object. The third is missing. CENTCOM gave no location, no circumstances, nothing beyond the word. Whoever loves that young man or woman is going to spend tonight, and possibly a great many nights, holding a question that has no floor under it.

I begin there because the language of this war has almost entirely stopped being the language of persons. Read back through the week’s coverage. Surveillance sites. Maritime capabilities. Underground weapons storage. Degrading capacity. Enforcing a blockade. Fifty thousand service members “operating across the Middle East.” Every one of those phrases is accurate, and every one of them is built to keep you from picturing a face. Then a number moves from 14 to 16, and the number is where a life goes when the state has stopped naming it.

Catholic social doctrine will not let us stay in that register. The Church’s teaching on war opens with the human person and stays there, and it insists that every party to a war, on every side, is made of them.

The Church Calls Them Servants Of The Security And Freedom Of Nations

Here is the sentence most Catholics have never heard. The Catechism says that “those who are sworn to serve their country in the armed forces are servants of the security and freedom of nations. If they carry out their duty honorably, they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace.”[10]

Read that slowly, because it does two jobs at once.

The first job is honor. The Church has never been pacifist in the sense of holding that the soldier’s vocation is intrinsically corrupt. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which is the Church’s own organized synthesis of everything she teaches in the social field, is direct about it: “The requirements of legitimate defense justify the existence in States of armed forces, the activity of which should be at the service of peace.” It goes further, saying that “everyone who serves in the armed forces is concretely called to defend good, truth and justice in the world,” and notes with real warmth how many have given their lives for those values and in defense of innocent people.[11] A Catholic can look at the soldier who died in Jordan on Friday and say, without any hedging, that his calling was a good one and that the Church holds him in honor.

The second job is the harder one, and almost nobody quotes it. Look again at the words the Church chose. Servants of the security and freedom of nations. Servants of peace. Those are the terms of the title, and a title with terms in it can be checked against reality. The government, the strategy, the strait, the price of Brent crude: none of those appear in the sentence.

So a Catholic looking at the eighth night of strikes should honor the young people carrying them out, and then ask whether the men who give the orders have kept faith with the title the Church gives to those who obey. When a soldier dies defending the security and freedom of nations, his death has a meaning the Church can name. When he dies enforcing a blockade in a fight over transit fees on a waterway, while both governments call themselves the guardians of that water, the honor stays with him, and the account comes due somewhere else.

The Debt Runs In One Direction

Dan’s readers know I keep coming back to Rerum Novarum, and this is why. Leo XIII wrote in 1891 about factory owners and wage laborers, but the moral structure he laid bare is the structure of every relationship in which one party commands and the other party’s body bears the risk. He listed the duties that bind the employer, and the first of them is “not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character.”[12] It is shameful and inhuman, he said, to misuse men as though they were things.

Apply that to the state and the soldier, and you get something uncomfortable, because the asymmetry is far greater than anything in a Manchester textile mill. A factory worker can quit. An enlisted sergeant in Jordan cannot. He has surrendered, by oath and by law, the power to remove himself from danger. Every ounce of the risk sits with him, and every ounce of the decision sits with people who are not in the blast radius. That gap is not a scandal by itself. It’s the shape of military service, and someone has to bear it, or no nation could be defended at all.

What Leo XIII saw is that a gap like that creates a debt, and the debt runs entirely in one direction. The greater your power over another person’s body, the heavier your obligation to that person’s dignity. Which means the moral weight of ordering an eighth consecutive night of strikes falls hardest on the ones giving the order, precisely because they are the ones who will not be standing in Jordan when the ballistic missiles come back.

And the debt does not end when the shooting does. It includes telling the families the truth about what their child died for. It includes not letting 16 dead become an argument for continuing so that the first 14 will not have been wasted, which is the oldest and cheapest reason ever given for extending a war. It includes the wounded, all 427 of them, long after the story falls off the front page. Pope Leo XIV, in Dilexi Te, presses the whole Church toward the people the world’s systems tend to discard once they have stopped being useful. Veterans belong in that reckoning. A country that spends a young man’s body and then hands him a claims form has not honored the debt Leo XIII described.

He Does Not Surrender His Conscience At The Recruiting Station

Now the part that most people find genuinely surprising, and that I think every Catholic in uniform deserves to have said plainly.

The Church does not teach that a soldier’s moral responsibility transfers upward to his commander. The Compendium is unambiguous: “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.” It continues that 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,” and then closes the door hard: “Such acts cannot be justified by claiming obedience to the orders of superiors.”[13] The Catechism says the same thing in six words: “Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse.”[14]

This is Nuremberg, but the Church got there first and grounded it in something firmer than a tribunal’s verdict. A person cannot hand his conscience to another person, because conscience is not transferable property. It’s constitutive of being a rational creature made in the image of God. You may obey lawful orders, and you should, and military discipline is a genuine good. You may not obey an order to do evil, because there is no authority on earth competent to issue one.

The same section adds that conscientious objectors, whether they reject all recourse to force or object to participation in one particular conflict, must be given a real alternative. The Catechism states the state’s side of that: “Public authorities should make equitable provision for those who for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms; these are nonetheless obliged to serve the human community in some other way.”[15] Notice the phrase “a particular conflict.” The Church’s category is not limited to the absolute pacifist. She recognizes the Catholic who serves willingly and then, looking at what he is being told to do in this specific war, cannot in conscience do it. In the Church’s eyes, he is a man exercising exactly the faculty he is obliged to exercise, and calling him a coward gets the moral situation backward. Compendium says he is morally o.

Which leads to a duty for the rest of us. If the Church says a soldier retains his conscience, then the Church is also saying the soldier needs formation to use it. Real formation, the kind that takes months. Chaplains who will actually walk through the moral law with a nineteen-year-old, parishes that talk about this before their kids ship out, and a Catholic public that does not treat “support the troops” as a synonym for “never ask what the troops are being ordered to do.” Loving a soldier means caring about what he is asked to carry home in his memory. The physical wounds get counted. The moral injury does not appear in any CENTCOM release, and it is often the wound that lasts longest.

What Leo XIV’s Judgment Changes For The One Taking Orders

Every post I’ve written this month has had to reckon with what Pope Leo XIV did in Magnifica Humanitas, and here it lands directly on the soldier. In paragraph 192, the Holy Father writes that “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.”[16]

That’s a development in Catholic teaching, and it should be named as one rather than smoothed over. The older tradition, running through Augustine and Aquinas and into the modern manuals, gave a checklist for evaluating a war’s justice. Leo XIV’s judgment is that the checklist has been used for so long as a machine for manufacturing permission that it no longer does the work it was built to do. Since he is the most recent voice of the Magisterium on the question, his teaching governs. Aquinas remains a giant, and I’ll keep reading him until the day I die, but a Catholic in 2026 does not get to reach past the reigning Pontiff for a framework the Pontiff has just set aside.

Here is why that matters to a young sailor on a warship in the Gulf. Under the old habit, “our side has a just cause” served as a blanket covering everything done beneath it. Leo XIV has pulled the blanket away. What remains is the right of self-defense understood strictly, plus the moral law applying to every single act, with no wholesale absolution available from the label on the war. The Catechism already insisted on this: the moral law retains its full force during armed conflict, and the fact that war has broken out does not mean that everything is permitted between the warring parties.

The soldier’s position under this teaching is more demanding and, I would argue, more honest. He evaluates what is in front of him. Is this a military target? Are the people who will die here combatants? Is what I am about to do the kind of act that a person can do and remain a person? He no longer has the option of resolving those questions by pointing at the flag, and honestly, he never really did.

Sixteen Names And One Still Missing

The Compendium says that seeking alternatives to war has taken on real urgency in our time, that the underlying causes of armed conflict must be identified, especially those rooted in structural injustice, poverty, and exploitation, and that “another name for peace is development.”[17] Read that against this war, and you can see how far the argument has drifted from anything resembling a cause worth a life. The fight is over a strait, over transit fees, over who collects and who controls, over a fifth of the world’s traded oil and gas. Both presidents have claimed the title of guardian of that water. And the price is being paid by a boy in Doha hit by falling shrapnel, by Kuwaiti firefighters burned at an oil facility, by more than 400 wounded Americans, by the Iranian dead whose families are grieving on exactly the same terms as the American families about to be notified, and now by two more Americans in Jordan and one whose family does not yet know which grief they are being handed.

Sixteen names and one still missing. That is the figure I want in front of you, because the number by itself is designed to be survivable. Names are not. The Church’s whole method in her social doctrine is to refuse the abstraction and insist on the person, and if you take nothing else from this post, take the habit of asking, every time a casualty figure moves, whose name just moved with it.

What This Deacon Asks Of You

Pray for the three families by name once you know the names. Read them aloud. Say a Mass intention for them and for the Iranian dead in the same breath, because Christ died for both and the Church has never permitted us to sort her prayers by passport.

If you have a service member in your family, ask them the real question. Not “are you okay,” which they will answer reflexively, but “what are they asking you to do, and can you do it.” Then be a person who can hear the answer.

If you have any access to the people who make these decisions, and in a republic you have more than you think, ask what the security and freedom being defended actually is, in plain words, and how the answer justifies a seventeenth night.

And hold both halves of the Church’s teaching at once. The soldier is honorable, and his death must still be accounted for by someone. Those two sentences belong together. The Church has been saying them together for a very long time, and a nation that hears only the first has learned exactly half of what it needs to know.

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Footnotes

1. J.D. Simkins, “2 US troops killed, 1 missing after Iranian missile, drone attack in Jordan,” Air Force Times, July 18, 2026, https://www.airforcetimes.com/flashpoints/2026/07/18/2-us-troops-killed–1-missing-after-iranian-missile-drone-attack-in-jordan/.

2. Associated Press, “U.S. and Iran escalate strikes across Mideast,” NPR, July 18, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/18/nx-s1–5898916/us-iran-escalate-strikes.

3. Greg Norman-Diamond and Michael Sinkewicz, “US military targets Iran with latest wave of strikes,” Fox News, July 18, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/iran-war-trump-israel-hormuz-oil-july–18–2026.

4. “Iran War Updates: U.S. concludes 8th straight night of strikes on Iran after Iranian attack kills 2 U.S. soldiers in Jordan,” CBS News, July 19, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iran-war-trump-strait-of-hormuz-attacks-persian-gulf/.

5. “Two US service members killed, one missing following Iranian strikes in Jordan,” CNN, July 18, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/18/politics/iran-war-us-service-members-killed-jordan.

6. “Iran suggests MoU ‘suspended’ amid reports 50 killed in US strikes in July,” Al Jazeera, July 18, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/18/iran-accuses-us-of-striking-critical-infrastructure-as-war-intensifies.

7. “US Says Two Service Members Killed by Iran Strikes in Jordan,” Bloomberg, July 18, 2026, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026–07–18/us-military-says-two-service-members-killed-in-action-in-jordan.

8. “Two US troops killed in Iranian missile attack on Jordan,” Axios, July 18, 2026, https://www.axios.com/2026/07/18/iran-jordan-us-deaths-military-two-dead.

9. “The U.S.-Iran battle over the Strait of Hormuz raises risks for global waterways,” NPR, July 17, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/nx-s1–5884849/us-iran-strait-hormuz-global-shipping-risk.

10. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2000), no. 2310.

11. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 502.

12. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, encyclical letter, May 15, 1891, no. 20, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.

13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 503.

14. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2313.

15. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2311.

16. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, encyclical letter, May 2026, no. 192.

17. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 498.