I’m not suggesting that a man like Pope Leo—the Vicar of Christ, the Bishop of Rome, the Servant of the Servants of God—would stoop to anything quite so base as “trolling” the onetime PayPal co-founder and current Antichrist alarmist Peter Thiel. But I’m also not not suggesting it, if you see what I mean.
How else to explain the novel appearance of Gandalf—yes, the pipe-smoking wizard!—in the pages of one of Catholicism’s most important documents, a major papal encyclical about AI and technology? Perhaps Leo, who was born and raised in Chicago before spending decades in Peru, is simply a big J.R.R. Tolkien buff who can’t get enough of magic rings, Eldar lore, and tricksy little hobbitses. Or perhaps Leo is sending a message.
In his new encyclical, released yesterday, Leo quotes one literary character in the entire 40,000-word document. It’s Gandalf, doling out some of his wisdom in a scene from Return of the King: “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.”
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