No one blinked when Pope Leo XIV dropped the names of saints in his new letter, *Magnifica Humanitas. But J.R.R. Tolkien? That caught people off guard. The fantasy writer is a Catholic hero. The pope put him right there in his first encyclical.
Leo is worried about us. About humans, specifically. We are living through an AI boom that feels too much like the Industrial Revolution. He cites his ancestor, Pope Leo XIII, to remind us that efficiency should not eat our dignity.
He warns of a technocratic machine. It wants to turn us into cogs.
The Tolkien reference lands like a mic drop. Why? Because the billionaires running AI seem to read Middle-earth backward. Leo might even be trolling.
The Vatican has not commented.
It is not our part to master all tides of the world
That is the advice Gandalf gave in Lord of the Rings. Leo borrows it to tell the tech oligarchs to cool it. We are not meant to control everything. We are meant to tend the fields we know.
Do they want to cure diseases? Or just print money forever?
Peter Thiel gets the idea of the ring wrong. He named his data company Palantir after Saruman’s crystal ball. A spy device. He calls his fund “The Precious,” the thing Gollum wants so badly he loses his soul.
Tolkien wrote about corruption. Thiel celebrates it.
Then there is Elon Musk. He thinks Hobbits are English nationalists who need walls to stay safe from barbarians. He used that take to defend a racist influencer in the UK. It is wrong. Historically. Textually.
Tolkien saw war. He saw tanks and factories and dead forests in WWI. He hated the industrial machine that ate nature. Saruman was a monster because he used slave labor and burned ancient trees to feed his war effort.
Does that sound familiar?
Thiel works with immigration enforcers. Musk gutted aid agencies. People died. Or will.
They both support an administration using AI for racist propaganda and war planning.
So Leo shouts out Gandalf. He wants us to root out evil where we find it. To protect the earth for the next generation.
Thiel knows his references. He chose them carefully. Musk just sees a mirror he likes.
The Pope is clear. Power corrupts. Greed kills.
Will they listen? Probably not.
