There’s something deliciously weird about the Bishop of Rome quoting a pipe-smoking wizard in a 40,000-word encyclical about artificial intelligence. But here we are.
Pope Leo, the Chicago-born pontiff who spent decades in Peru before ascending to the Vatican, dropped exactly one literary reference in his major new document on technology and AI. It’s a line from Gandalf in The 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.”
On its surface, it’s a lovely sentiment about small acts of fidelity and tending to your own garden. But given who’s been listening lately, it reads like a quietly devastating critique.
The Tolkien Industrial Complex
Peter Thiel has built something of a fantasy world of his own in Silicon Valley. The PayPal co-founder and longtime tech libertarian has named company after company after Tolkien’s legendarium. There’s Palantir, his data analytics giant with deep ties to US intelligence agencies. There’s Mithril Capital Management. Valar Ventures. Rivendell One. Lembas LLC.
According to Business Insider, Thiel’s inner circle even jokes that his venture capital firm, the Founders Fund, is nicknamed “The Precious”—a clear nod to Gollum’s obsession with the One Ring.
It’s not just Thiel, either. His protégé J.D. Vance, now US Vice President, once founded a VC firm called Narya, after one of the Three Rings of Power given to the elves. Palmer Luckey, who built Anduril (another Tolkien name), launched a digital bank backed by Thiel called Erebor—the Lonely Mountain from The Hobbit.
This isn’t subtle. These are people who genuinely see themselves as heroes in a grand fantasy narrative, fighting cosmic battles against darkness.
The Antichrist Question
Here’s where it gets strange. Thiel has spent years promoting a fairly idiosyncratic version of Christianity centered on the Antichrist—a figure from Revelation whom he believes will emerge through global governance and centralized control. According to The Guardian, Thiel views “the unification of the world under one global state as essentially identical to the Antichrist.”
His private lectures on this topic, which The Associated Press reported were hosted in Rome earlier this year, caused such controversy that Catholic universities distance themselves from the events. Recordings have leaked, showing Thiel connecting his fears about “peace and safetyism”—that is, regulation and global cooperation—to biblical prophecy.
In one recording, Thiel cited 1 Thessalonians 5:3, arguing that “the slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.” He sees regulatory bodies like the FDA and Nuclear Regulatory Commission as instruments of this stagnation, effectively globalized control mechanisms that prelude the end times.
And AI? AI is the weapon that could break this stagnation. Thiel has expressed on various platforms that we should “take the guardrails off AI” despite the risks, because the alternative—cultural and technological stasis—is worse.
The Pope’s Response
Now enter Pope Leo with his encyclical calling for a “civilization of love” and asking technology to shed its “messianic and neo-colonial tendencies.” He explicitly cautions against transhumanism and unregulated artificial intelligence—not as tools of progress, but as potential instruments of dehumanization.
The Gandalf quote fits perfectly into this framework. It’s a rebuttal to the Silicon Valley worldview that great battles and world-striding technology will save us. Tolkien’s actual story, after all, ends not with the great armies of Men or the wizard’s power, but with two hobbits returning home to heal their small corner of the world. The ring is destroyed not by strength but by the wretched Gollum, whose obsession incidentally saves Middle-earth.
This is a fundamentally different vision than what Thiel offers. Where Thiel sees AI as the path to breaking stagnation and averting cosmic evil, Leo sees it as another temptation toward the “greatness” that Ultimately destroys.
The Catholic Herald asked directly whether the encyclical was “aimed at Peter Thiel’s techno-political empire.” Tech blogger Simon Willison wondered if the Tolkien quote was “the Pope throwing a little shade at Peter Thiel.”
Maybe. Or maybe the Pope is simply offering a counter-narrative to a certain kind of tech-bro eschatology—one that happens to share the same literary sources but reaches the opposite conclusion. Both Thiel and Leo love Tolkien. They just read it entirely differently.
The Pope isn’t telling these tech billionaires to stop believing in their mission. He’s asking them to reconsider what that mission actually looks like—and whether the world needs more wizards and warriors, or more hobbits tending their gardens.
The question is whether anyone in Silicon Valley is listening.
