Every so often on this show, I set the conversation aside and simply read something. This is one of those episodes.
Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. And in paragraph 213, in the middle of an argument about the small and steadfast acts of fidelity that stand as a bulwark against dehumanization, the pope quotes a wizard.
The wizard is Gandalf, and this is what he says: "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" (The Return of the King).
I have to say I wasn't surprised. Some years ago I wrote a long essay about why The Lord of the Rings is a Catholic book — not because there is any religion in it, because there isn't any, but because of what Tolkien absorbed into the story. An account of power. An account of hope. An account of discernment and responsibility. And an account of what goes unseen.
When I read what Leo had written, I wanted to go back to that thought about Tolkien's Catholic work. So that is what this episode is: that essay, read for you start to finish, bringing forth some of Tolkien's Catholic vision, embedded in and absorbed into his Lord of the Rings.
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