Nobody was surprised that Pope Leo XIV cited well-known saints and previous pontiffs in his first encyclical, or papal letter of spiritual guidance, “Magnifica humanitas,” released Monday.
But the name that immediately jumped out to many readers is one synonymous with high fantasy literature: J.R.R. Tolkien, the Catholic author of The Lord of the Rings.
Leo’s letter is concerned with “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” a major theme of his first year as leader of the Catholic Church. Drawing from his predecessor, Pope Francis, he warns of “the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm,” one capable of “reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” He again compares the rise of AI to the Industrial Revolution that spanned from the mid-18th century to the beginning of the 20th, alluding to the teachings of his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who in his own 1891 encyclical asserted the importance of workers’ rights and dignity during a time of technological upheaval and burgeoning capitalist empire.
The lengthy text further solidifies Leo’s stance as an AI skeptic. But the Tolkien nod is particularly salient given some backward interpretations of Middle-earth mythology by right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, which have long been ridiculed by other Lord of the Rings fans. One might even think Leo is trolling. (The Vatican did not immediately return a request for comment.)
Clearly, the pope is somewhat concerned about the motives of tech oligarchs racing to develop artificial general intelligence that surpasses human capabilities. Do they really dream of using this tool to cure diseases and solve climate change, or are they building engines of limitless profit and cultural dominance? It’s when he addresses our personal responsibility in challenging such dark forces that Leo borrows an insight from Tolkien’s famous wizard, Gandalf: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
That lesson is miles away from what Musk and Thiel apparently see in Tolkien’s masterpiece.
Thiel named his data analytics firm Palantir, after the crystal ball used as a spying device by the traitorous wizard Saruman in the saga; he reportedly calls his venture capital firm, the Founders Fund, “the precious,” which is what the twisted and covetous character Gollum calls the One Ring, a magical means of totalitarian power. Almost anyone who encounters Tolkien (or adaptations of his work) can see that he was writing about the corrupting effect of such power—in the novels, the temptation to rule inevitably undoes anyone who succumbs to it—yet Thiel seems to revel in the same possibilities of authoritarian control and omniscience as the villains.
Musk, for his part, has suggested that Tolkien’s epic can be read as an anti-immigration, build-the-wall parable: “When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away,” he posted on X in October. “They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.” He offered this simply inaccurate recollection of Lord of the Rings as a defense of Islamophpbic far-right UK agitator Tommy Robinson.