The Coordinates Were Agreed in Three Capitals: Catholic Teaching on Who Belongs at the Table

Iran’s foreign ministry said Wednesday that Tehran and Muscat had agreed on the coordinates. The actual latitude and longitude of two lanes of open sea, worked out and written down. A fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once moved through that water, and the households that heat with it and eat because of it are scattered across every continent. Almost none of them will read the document before it takes effect. The Church has a specific word for what is missing from that arrangement, and she has been using it far longer than anyone has been drawing lanes through Hormuz.

The News Story

Iran and Oman have agreed on the coordinates of shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz and are finalizing a joint statement on managing traffic there, Iranian officials said, bringing the closed waterway closer to reopening more than five months into the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Wednesday that a joint Tehran-Muscat statement was in final drafting and under review, covering technical, legal, security and environmental points, and that results would be announced only after the talks conclude. Al Jazeera reported Thursday that Iran described the deal as “on the verge of being finalised.”

President Donald Trump, asked by reporters traveling with him in California about an Axios report that an announcement could come Wednesday, said, “It could happen. Tomorrow or the next day. A lot of progress has been made.” Trump decided Saturday not to proceed with threatened large-scale strikes on Iran to allow more time for diplomacy.

Axios, citing two regional sources and a U.S. official, reported the emerging interim arrangement would run 60 days with an option to extend. Inbound ships would transit a northern lane through Iranian waters; outbound ships would use a southern lane through Omani waters in coordination with Tehran. No tolls or fees would be charged during the 60-day period, and the parties would work to clear naval mines from the strait’s median lane within 30 days, after which that lane would carry two-way traffic under a permanent Oman-Iran arrangement. Axios reported Iranian leadership completed its approval process Tuesday, following calls among U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, with Qatari, Pakistani and Saudi mediation.

Accounts of transit fees differ. Two regional officials told The Associated Press that service fees would be charged for security and environmental protection, and AP reported the draft was awaiting final approval from Iran’s supreme leader. Trump has publicly opposed charges: “I’m not going to let them charge,” he said Monday. “Anybody’s going to charge, we’ll charge.” Oman and Iran have not officially commented.

The strait, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, has been effectively closed since fighting began February 28, driving up fuel and goods prices worldwide. U.S. Central Command said the southern route “remains free and open for all commercial vessels” and that U.S. forces have assisted more than 1,000 vessels transiting over the past three months. Oil eased on the news: Brent traded near $80 a barrel Wednesday, and West Texas Intermediate was near $75 Thursday after falling roughly 11 percent over the week’s first three sessions.

Attacks on shipping continued. Yemen’s Houthis said Wednesday they struck the Saudi oil tanker Wafa with ballistic missiles off Yanbu in the Red Sea, the eighth Saudi tanker targeted since their blockade began July 22. On Tuesday an Indian-flagged ship sank off Yemen after being hit by an explosive-laden boat; its 14 crew were rescued. A cargo ship also reported being hit by an unknown projectile near Al Khasab, Oman, according to the U.K. Maritime Trade Operations center.^1–11

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

The Sentence About Coordinates

Most of the coverage this week led with Trump’s timing. Wednesday, or maybe Thursday. A lot of progress has been made. The line that should hold a Catholic’s attention came out of Tehran instead, and it was almost technical enough to skip: Iran and Oman had agreed on the coordinates of the routes, and a joint statement was in final drafting, covering technical, legal, security and environmental points, with results to be announced after the conclusion.

Sit with the shape of that. Two governments took a chart of the Strait of Hormuz, set the dividers down, and worked out where the inbound lane would run and where the outbound lane would run. A third government, in Washington, was on the phone throughout. When it is signed, ships carrying grain to Pakistan and diesel to East Africa and liquefied gas to Japan will move along lines that were drawn by three foreign ministries and reviewed by a supreme leader.

Everyone who depends on that water was outside the room. The coordinates were agreed in three capitals, and the world that lives on what crosses them will be told the terms after the fact.

That is a genuine moral defect, and the Church names it precisely. It is a failure of participation.

Water Is Infrastructure, and Infrastructure Is a Demand of the Common Good

Start with what a strait actually is in Catholic terms. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which is the Church’s own organized summary of her social teaching, gives a working list of what the common good concretely demands in any given historical period. That list includes “the commitment to peace, the organization of the State’s powers, a sound juridical system, the protection of the environment, and the provision of essential services to all, some of which are at the same time human rights: food, housing, work, education and access to culture, transportation, basic health care, the freedom of communication and expression, and the protection of religious freedom.”¹²

Transportation sits in that sentence between education and health care. The Church puts moving people and goods in the same category as feeding and healing them, because in a world of any complexity the second depends entirely on the first. A closed strait is a bottleneck in the food supply of nations that do not grow enough of their own, and the Compendium says in the very next line that every nation owes a duty of “true worldwide cooperation for the common good of the whole of humanity and for future generations also.”¹²

So the water at Hormuz is already inside the Church’s account of the common good before anyone starts negotiating. The question is who gets to decide how a good like that is administered.

A Good That Cannot Be Split Two Ways

The Compendium is blunt about the nature of a common good. It “does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains ‘common’, because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness.”¹³ Indivisible. Only together.

Then comes the harder sentence, and I would put it on the wall of every negotiating room in Muscat: “The common good must be served in its fullness, not according to reductionist visions that are subordinated by certain people to their advantages.”¹⁴

Look at what has been reported and ask whether that condition is being met. Iran gets control of inbound traffic. Oman gets outbound. Reporting on service fees has run in two directions, with regional officials telling the AP that charges would apply for security and environmental protection, while other reporting describes a 60-day window with no tolls at all. The American president’s public answer to the fee question was, “I’m not going to let them charge. Anybody’s going to charge, we’ll charge.” Three parties, three sets of advantages, and a common good getting carved into shares.

I want to be fair to the negotiators here, because the alternative to this deal is worse and everyone involved knows it. A flawed arrangement that reopens the strait will feed people who are currently going without, and the Church has room in her teaching for partial goods honestly pursued. She also insists that the way a good gets decided belongs to its morality, and not only the result.

The Word the Church Uses

The Compendium devotes a whole section to participation, and it defines the thing carefully. Participation “is expressed essentially in a series of activities by means of which the citizen, either as an individual or in association with others, whether directly or through representation, contributes to the cultural, economic, political and social life of the civil community to which he belongs. Participation is a duty to be fulfilled consciously by all, with responsibility and with a view to the common good.”¹⁵

Then the Compendium refuses to let anyone confine it to town councils. Participation “cannot be confined or restricted to only a certain area of social life,” and it reaches “more than anything else, in the fields of social and political life even at the highest levels.” And it names the payoff directly: “The cooperation of all peoples and the building of an international community in a framework of solidarity depends on this latter area.”¹⁵ The document adds that it is “absolutely necessary to encourage participation above all of the most disadvantaged.”¹⁵

Read that against a 60-day arrangement drafted by two coastal states and a superpower and you see the gap. The nations most disadvantaged by five months of closed water are the ones with the least room to absorb a fuel shock and the fewest ships of their own. They are precisely the parties the Compendium says must be encouraged into the room first. They are not in it.

The Catechism grounds the same duty in the person rather than the institution. “‘Participation’ is the voluntary and generous engagement of a person in social interchange. It is necessary that all participate, each according to his position and role, in promoting the common good. This obligation is inherent in the dignity of the human person.”¹⁶ Inherent in the dignity. A person shut out of decisions that govern whether he can buy fuel this winter has suffered something done to his dignity, and not merely to his budget.

Informed, Listened to, Involved

The Compendium sets a three-part test that is unusually easy to apply. Writing about participative government, it says that “the different subjects of civil community at every level must be informed, listened to and involved in the exercise of the carried-out functions.”¹⁷

Take the three in order against this week.

Informed. The Iranian spokesman said the results would be announced after the conclusion. The terms currently reaching the public come through anonymous regional officials talking to Axios and the AP, and those accounts already contradict each other on the central question of fees. No one outside the three governments knows what is actually in the draft.

Listened to. Qatar, according to Al Jazeera’s reporting, called publicly for freedom of navigation and for consensus among regional states on any future arrangement governing the waterway. That is a neighbor asking, in diplomatic language, to be heard on a matter that runs along its own coast. Qatar is a wealthy state with real weight to throw. If it has to make that request in public, the shipping ministries of poorer nations are not being consulted at all.

Involved. The mediation list is Qatari, Pakistani and Saudi, which is a real improvement over two parties in a room. Notice, though, that every one of those states was brought in for the pressure it can apply to Tehran or Washington. Mediation by the powerful on behalf of the powerful is a different thing from participation by the affected.

The Habit of Making Deals

The Compendium has one more line on participation that I did not expect to find so exactly aimed at this story. Among the practices that corrode genuine participation, it lists “attempts by certain citizens to ‘make deals’ with institutions in order to obtain more advantageous conditions for themselves, as though these institutions were at the service of their selfish needs.”¹⁸

The passage is written about citizens and their own governments, and I do not want to stretch it past what it says. The habit it describes, though, scales without much trouble. A strait is an institution of the international community in every meaningful sense: a shared passage governed by long-settled custom, serving everyone who uses it. What is being negotiated this week treats that institution as an asset to be split by whoever has warships or coastline nearby. Iran wants control of a lane it did not control before February. Washington wants the fee structure it prefers. Oman wants its sovereignty respected and, by some accounts, a share of the revenue. Each party is doing what states do. The Church’s judgment is that the doing of it, by all of them at once, produces something that cannot be called a common good even if it reopens the water.

Nehemiah Did Not Impose Solutions from Above

Pope Leo XIV built his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, around two images from Scripture, and the second one lands squarely on this week’s news. Against the Tower of Babel, the Holy Father sets Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. Read what he draws out of the story: “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, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition.” The city, Leo writes, “is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all.”¹⁹

He turns that into a principle a few paragraphs later: “All are given their own section of the wall: scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities. This is the logic of subsidiarity.”²⁰

Babel, by contrast, is the project of “a single language, a single technology, a single direction,” built by people who “sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves.”²¹ Three foreign ministries drawing coordinates on a chart behind closed doors, then publishing the result as a fait accompli, is closer to the tower than to the wall. Leo’s own diagnosis of the Babel pattern names “a uniformity that neutralizes differences,” and the antidote he proposes is the plurality of voices, with listening and dialogue as the ground on which justice gets built.²¹

Where Leo XIV Puts the Weight

The encyclical’s treatment of solidarity makes the demand explicit. Solidarity, Leo writes, “is expressed when each person, both individually and collectively, takes part in the life of the community, by staying informed, engaging with others, making their voice heard and contributing to public decisions and choices, while also assuming real responsibility so that the common good is achieved through shared decision-making.”²² Shared decision-making. The Holy Father is describing the mechanism by which a common good comes into existence at all, and a courtesy that generous governments extend when it suits them will not do the work.

He goes further when he turns to social justice, and this sentence deserves to be quoted in full because it names the remedy: justice “aims to mend broken bonds and reintegrate those who have been excluded,” and this “may include restoring dignity and a voice to those who have been ignored.”²³ A voice to those who have been ignored. That is the standard by which whatever gets signed in the next few days should be judged.

One thing needs saying plainly, because the older Catholic vocabulary would let us dodge it. For centuries Catholics reached for Just War theory to test whether a war could be fought rightly, and much of that framework came down to us through Saint Thomas Aquinas. In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV treats that theory as outdated, faulting it for having been used to justify almost any war and for failing to account for the speed and destructiveness of modern conflict, while preserving a narrow right of self-defense and calling instead for peace built through justice and diplomacy.²⁴ The Church’s most recent teaching governs, so the older checklist cannot be used here to bless a settlement simply because a war produced it. The fact that five months of fighting created these facts on the water gives nobody a moral title to divide it. The terms have to answer to justice on their own.

What a Catholic Should Want Out of the Next Few Days

The Catechism supplies the frame for the ask. “Human interdependence is increasing and gradually spreading throughout the world. The unity of the human family, embracing people who enjoy equal natural dignity, implies a universal common good. This good calls for an organization of the community of nations able to ‘provide for the different needs of men.’”²⁵ And the measure of any such arrangement: “The order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around.”²⁶

Three concrete things follow.

Publish the terms. A deal governing a fifth of the world’s energy trade should not reach the public through anonymous sourcing that contradicts itself on whether fees exist. Informed comes first in the Compendium’s list for a reason.¹⁷

Seat the people who pay. The 60-day window is temporary by design and the permanent arrangement is to be negotiated later between Iran and Oman alone. That later negotiation is where the shipping states, the importing states, and the seafarers’ associations belong at the table, and the Compendium’s instruction to encourage the participation of the most disadvantaged first is not a suggestion.¹⁵

Refuse the framing that possession decides. Iran’s coastline gives it real interests and real security claims, and so does Oman’s. Neither gives either one the authority to set the terms on which the rest of the human family eats.

Nehemiah, in Leo XIV’s telling, walked the ruins in silence before he assigned anyone anything, and then he called the families together. Something like that is available even now. The dividers are still on the chart. Somebody could still open the door.

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Notes

1. ↑ Barak Ravid, “U.S. Nears Hormuz Deal, Aiming for Wednesday Announcement,” Axios, August 5, 2026, axios.com.
2. ↑ Elena Becatoros, Samy Magdy and Darlene Superville, “Trump Says Deal to Reopen the Strait of Hormuz Could Come as Early as Wednesday,” Associated Press, published via PBS NewsHour, August 5, 2026, pbs.org.
3. ↑ Duarte Dias, “Live Updates: Trump Says Strait of Hormuz Deal Could Happen Today or Tomorrow Amid Iran-Oman Talks,” CBS News, August 5, 2026, cbsnews.com.
4. ↑ Enes Abuomer and Zaid Sabah, “Iran War Live: Tehran, Oman Close In on Hormuz Deal; Houthis Attack Tankers,” Al Jazeera, August 6, 2026, aljazeera.com.
5. ↑ “Iran, Oman, US ‘Close’ to Hormuz Deal: What Do They All Want?,” Al Jazeera, August 5, 2026, aljazeera.com.
6. ↑ “Iran, Oman Say Strait of Hormuz Talks in Final Stages, as Trump Again Teases a Deal Being Close,” CNBC, August 5, 2026, cnbc.com.
7. ↑ “Iran, Oman Reach Agreement on Proposed Strait of Hormuz Shipping Route,” Bloomberg, August 5, 2026, bloomberg.com.
8. ↑ “Oil Prices Slip as Iran Cites Progress with Oman on Hormuz Agreement,” Reuters, August 6, 2026, lufkindailynews.com.
9. ↑ “Trump Says Tehran Has ‘Last Chance’ for Deal as Negotiations Resume,” Fox News Digital, August 4, 2026, foxnews.com.
10. ↑ “August 5, 2026: Houthis Claim to Attack Saudi Oil Tanker, Trump Says Hormuz Reopening ‘Soon,’” CNN, August 5, 2026, cnn.com.
11. ↑ “Iran and Oman Agree Route for Ships in Strait of Hormuz, Tehran Says,” Euronews, August 5, 2026, euronews.com.
12. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 166.
13. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 164, quoting Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, no. 26.
14. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 167.
15. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 189.
16. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1913, vatican.va.
17. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 190.
18. ↑ Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 191.
19. ↑ 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. 8, vatican.va.
20. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 13.
21. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 7 and 10.
22. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 73.
23. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 79.
24. ↑ Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192.
25. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1911, vatican.va.
26. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1912.

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003