The Bill Arrives At The Kitchen Table: What The Church Says About A War Congress Never Voted On

Friday’s inflation report reads like a household ledger. Gasoline up 27 percent in a year. Fuel oil up 52 percent. Airline fares up 23 percent. Diesel at $6.06, a record. Every one of those lines traces back to a war with Iran that started on February 28, and next Wednesday the Federal Reserve will probably raise interest rates to fight the prices that war produced. So the family pays at the pump, then pays again on the mortgage and the car loan. What the family never did was vote on any of it, and neither did the people it elected to do that voting. The Church has a great deal to say about who bears a war’s cost and who gets a voice in the decision, and both halves of that teaching point at the same kitchen table.

The News Story

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday morning that the Consumer Price Index rose 0.4 percent in August on a seasonally adjusted basis, after a 0.1 percent increase in July. Over the 12 months ending in August, the all-items index rose 3.4 percent, the same annual pace recorded for the 12 months ending in July. Economists polled by FactSet had expected an annual rate of 3.3 percent.

Energy accounted for much of the monthly move. The gasoline index rose 3.9 percent in August and, by the bureau’s own accounting, made up more than a third of the total monthly increase in the all-items index. Gasoline is 27.4 percent more expensive than it was in August 2025. The broader energy index rose 2.1 percent for the month and 16.3 percent over the year. Fuel oil climbed 10.1 percent in August alone and is up 52 percent from a year earlier.

Prices outside energy moved too. Core CPI, which strips out food and energy, rose 0.3 percent in August after a 0.2 percent rise in July, running hotter than forecasters expected. The annual core rate eased to 2.4 percent from 2.5 percent. Shelter rose 0.3 percent for the month and is 3.0 percent higher over the year. Airline fares rose 2.7 percent in August and are up 23.4 percent over 12 months. Medical care fell 0.2 percent, and motor vehicle insurance fell 0.8 percent. Grocery prices were unchanged for the month, and the food index is up 2.7 percent over the year.

Outlets across the spectrum connected the energy figures to the war with Iran, which began in late February. Annual inflation has stayed above 3 percent since March. Brent crude traded above $100 a barrel this week as fighting around the Strait of Hormuz continued. AAA reported a national average diesel price of $6.06 a gallon on Friday, a record, and more than 60 percent above the $3.71 average of a year earlier. The national gasoline average reached $4.30. Analysts pointed out that the August survey period closed before that most recent run-up in fuel prices, so the September report will carry more of it.

Attention now turns to the Federal Reserve, whose policy meeting concludes Wednesday, September 16. A rate hike would be the central bank’s first since 2023. After the CPI release, CME FedWatch put the probability of a hike at roughly 90 percent, up from about 70 percent the day before, and Reuters reported market pricing near 91 percent. Chairman Kevin Warsh said at the Fed’s Jackson Hole gathering last month that the bank would “have work to do” if inflation did not fade. Governor Christopher Waller said on September 3 that his decision would be “heavily influenced” by the August inflation reading.

Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo of Goldman Sachs Asset Management wrote Friday that the data “does not fully capture some of the inflation pressures that have emerged more recently.”

The report lands less than two months before the midterm elections, with the cost of living a central argument in both parties’ campaigns. The September CPI is scheduled for release on October 14. ^[1]

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

Start with the word itself. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church points out that “economy” comes from the Greek oikonomia (oy-koh-noh-MEE-ah), household management, and that economic life “was born from domestic work.” ^[2] The etymology carries a claim about where the economy lives. The Compendium goes on to say that the family “must rightfully be seen as an essential agent of economic life, guided not by the market mentality but by the logic of sharing and solidarity among generations.” ^[2] Read Friday’s report with that sentence in hand, and the numbers stop being abstractions. A 3.4 percent inflation rate describes what happened to a household. Fuel oil up 52 percent is a family in Omaha or Bangor deciding whether the furnace runs in October. Airline fares up 23 percent is a grandmother who does not get visited at Thanksgiving.

The Compendium builds the Church’s economic teaching outward from that household. It insists on a family wage, “a wage sufficient to maintain a family and allow it to live decently,” and adds a clause people tend to skip: such a wage “must also allow for savings that will permit the acquisition of property as a guarantee of freedom.” ^[3] Inflation is the specific enemy of that clause. A raise that lags prices is a pay cut, and savings that earn less than 3.4 percent shrink every month they sit in the bank. When the Fed answers on Wednesday with a rate hike, the family that was hoping to buy a house or replace the car pays a second time, in interest. The Church does not oppose the Fed doing its job. She simply insists that when we count the cost of a policy, we count it at the level of the family, because “people must not be considered only as individuals but also in relation to the family nucleus to which they belong.” ^[4]

So far this is standard Catholic economics, and it would apply to any inflation. What makes this inflation different is its cause. Every outlet on Friday, left and right, traced the energy numbers to the war. And the war has a feature that the Church’s teaching on authority speaks to directly.

Who Was Asked

The United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28. In the six months since, Congress has never voted to authorize the war. The House has twice passed resolutions directing the president to end American involvement, 215 to 208 in June and 214 to 208 in July, and the Senate approved a similar measure in June before reversing itself the next day on a separate one. None of those votes bound anyone. The vote that would have bound everyone, an authorization for the use of military force, has never been taken. ^[5]

The Compendium’s account of political authority starts from a principle that Americans tend to think of as their own invention. “The subject of political authority is the people considered in its entirety as those who have sovereignty,” it says. The people “transfers the exercise of sovereignty to those whom it freely elects as its representatives, but it preserves the prerogative to assert this sovereignty in evaluating the work of those charged with governing and also in replacing them.” ^[6] Authority, in the Church’s account, is on loan. The lender keeps the right to audit.

That audit has to happen somewhere, and the Compendium is clear that the ballot box alone is a thin version of it. “Every democracy must be participative,” it says, and it spells out what that means: the members of the community “must be informed, listened to and involved in the exercise of the carried-out functions.” ^[7] Informed, listened to, involved. Set those three words next to a war that was begun by executive decision and has now run for 196 days without a single authorizing vote, and you have the problem in one line. The people were told. They were never asked.

There is an obvious reply, and it deserves a real answer. Presidents have used force without authorization for decades, and the Church has never required a particular constitutional procedure before a state may defend itself. Both things are true. But the Church’s teaching on war has always placed the judgment about whether force is justified with a specific party. The Compendium, quoting the Catechism, says that “the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” ^[8] In the American order, the Constitution assigns the responsibility for declaring war to Congress, the branch that answers to the people every 2 years. The Church leaves constitutions to the nations that write them, and she teaches that the division of powers is worth keeping. She calls it “the principle of the ‘rule of law’, in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals,” and says plainly that “it is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds.” ^[9] A war that one branch starts and another branch cannot stop is a war outside those bounds.

The Cost Of A War No Branch Will End

In Magnifica Humanitas, published this May, Pope Leo XIV wrote 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.” ^[10] The older framework, which the Compendium still lays out in its traditional form, asked whether a war met certain conditions at the start. Leo XIV’s concern is what happens after the start. “It is much easier to start a war than to stop it,” he wrote, “and yet, discussion on conflict prevention remains tragically marginal.” He warned of conflicts that “tend to become protracted, with extremely high human and environmental costs.” ^[11] And a few paragraphs earlier he identified the thing that lets such wars keep going: when memory of what war costs fades, “political decisions risk being made on the basis of power alone, without any consideration for the long-term consequences.” ^[12]

Six months in, this war is the case study. It has produced a record diesel price, a year of 3-percent-plus inflation, and a rate hike that will be felt in every mortgage application in the country. Those are the long-term consequences, and they fall on families that were never consulted. The Compendium’s warning on war is older and blunter. Quoting Pius XII, it says, “Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost by war,” and adds that “the damage caused by an armed conflict is not only material but also moral.” ^[13] The material damage appears on Friday’s report. The moral damage is the growing habit of treating the people who pay for war as spectators.

Leo XIV opens the same encyclical with Nehemiah, and I think the choice was deliberate. Nehemiah came back to a ruined Jerusalem with the king’s authority in his pocket, and the pope notes what he did with it: “He did not impose solutions from above. He convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns.” ^[14] The rebuilding worked, Leo says, because it became “the shared responsibility of all.” ^[14] The Church’s model of authority in a crisis is the man who convened the families. The Compendium’s model of a healthy republic is one where the people are informed, listened to, and involved. Our current practice is a war the families finance and did not convene.

That leaves the Catholic citizen with a duty, and the Compendium names it. It warns against “the practice of citizens to limit their participation to the electoral process.” ^[15] So the response to this report starts before November 3. Every American needs to call their representative, whose job it is to hold this vote, and ask why it was never held. It treats “the war caused the inflation” as a sentence with a subject, and asks who the subject is. The bill arrives at the kitchen table every month. The Church teaches that the people sitting there are the sovereign, and a sovereign is owed an answer.

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This story turns on participation: the people’s right to be informed, listened to, and involved in the decisions they are made to pay for.

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Footnotes

1. “Consumer Price Index Summary, August 2026,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 11, 2026, bls.gov; “Consumer Prices, Inflation and the Fed,” Associated Press, September 11, 2026, apnews.com; “Inflation Stayed Hot in August with Annual Pace of 3.4%, Raising the Odds of a Fed Hike,” CBS News, September 11, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Consumer Prices Remained Elevated in August Ahead of Fed’s Next Meeting,” Fox Business, September 11, 2026, foxbusiness.com; “Inflation Stays Hot in August as Iran War Drives Energy Costs Higher,” Axios, September 11, 2026, axios.com; “Inflation Held Steady in August as Iran War Surges Oil Prices,” The Hill, September 11, 2026, thehill.com; “Inflation Persisted in August, Potentially Locking in a Fed Interest Rate Hike,” CNBC, September 11, 2026, cnbc.com; “Inflation Ticked Up in August, Setting the Stage for the Fed to Hike Interest Rates,” NBC News, September 11, 2026, nbcnews.com; “Prices Climbed Slightly in August as Fed Weighs Interest-Rate Increase,” The Washington Times, September 11, 2026, washingtontimes.com. ↩
2. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 248, vatican.va. ↩
3. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 250. ↩
4. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 254. ↩
5. Claudia Grisales, “For a 2nd Time, House Approves Resolution to End the War in Iran in a Rebuke to Trump,” NPR, July 23, 2026, npr.org. ↩
6. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 395. ↩
7. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 190. ↩
8. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 500, quoting Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2309. ↩
9. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 408, quoting John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 44. ↩
10. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), no. 192, vatican.va. ↩
11. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 195. ↩
12. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 191. ↩
13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 497, quoting Pius XII, Radio Message of August 24, 1939. ↩
14. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 8. ↩
15. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 191. ↩