Before this the only ships let through were the ones that were OKed by iran. You could be OKed by iran either if you were going there to buy and transport Iranian oil or if you paid Iran a huge fee. Either way Iran was making huge amounts of money on this especially since the oil prices were so high and they were the only ones able to export oil from the region.
So this recent move of blocking the straight completely is not a dumb move if one wants to weaken iran. There were headlines going around saying Iran was making more money during the war than before the war. Such a situation of course meant iran is in no hurry whatsoever to sign a peace deal with the US, especially not a disadvantageous one.
This new blockade will however highen oil prices even more now that not even Iranian oil can leave. But this will put pressure on Iran towards making peace deal. If a peace deal is met the strait can be completely open again and oil prices can start going down. That’s the thought behind it. We’ll see if it actually works. It doesn’t look like Iran is too desperate to sign a peace deal and why would they? They can probably handle not exporting oil for a longer time than Trump can politically survive constantly increasing fuel prices and inflation. And they know that fact. The Iranian leadership are crazy religious fanatics but they don’t strike me as stupid.
You would think Catholics would be absolutely outraged by this but the pope, who before was totally taboo to ever criticize, has been getting lots of criticism from Catholics for a long time now, ever since pope Francis was elected and but especially now with pope Leo. Ironically the absolutely fiercest critics of the pope are the so called “tradcaths” or ultra conservative catholic zoomers. If you look at their social media bubble it’s shit thrown at whatever the pope is saying every single week.
I don’t think US conservative Catholics care at all what Trump is saying about the pope. They hate the pope themselves. Maybe they will even cheer on.