Pope warns tech oligarchs while invoking Tolkien

In his first encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV frames AI as a human-stakes issue shaped by the risk of technocracy—then he borrows Tolkien’s language to argue that people must act where they can, not chase control they can’t master. The Tolkien r

By Monday, Pope Leo XIV had already signaled the direction of his papacy. In his first encyclical. “Magnifica humanitas. ” he leaned on the familiar voices of Catholic tradition—well-known saints and previous pontiffs—while turning sharply toward one modern concern: how to “safeguard the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”.

The letter arrives in the opening year of his leadership, and it doesn’t sound neutral. Leo warns about “the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm. ” describing how it can “reduce creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” He also places today’s AI boom in historical context. comparing its rise to the Industrial Revolution. spanning from the mid-18th century to the beginning of the 20th.

That comparison matters because Leo is also drawing on the teaching of his namesake, Pope Leo XIII. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical emphasized the importance of workers’ rights and dignity during a time of technological upheaval and the rise of a burgeoning capitalist empire.

The length of the encyclical does more than echo older concerns—it solidifies Leo’s posture as an AI skeptic. But it’s the Tolkien thread that has startled many readers, because the Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien—best known for The Lord of the Rings—sits at the center of the pope’s most pointed lesson.

The timing is hard to ignore. It comes as right-wing billionaire figures including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have tried to read Middle-earth through their own politics. and those interpretations have long been ridiculed by other Lord of the Rings fans. With that cultural backdrop. the Vatican’s decision to bring Tolkien into a document warning about AI’s human dangers has felt. to some. like provocation.

The Vatican did not immediately return a request for comment.

Leo’s letter is not only suspicious of where AI power might come from. It also presses on the question of motives—whether the rush by tech oligarchs to build artificial general intelligence that surpasses human capabilities is driven by lofty goals like curing diseases and solving climate change. or by something darker: limitless profit and cultural dominance. His answer begins not with arguments about machines, but with personal responsibility.

To make that shift. Leo quotes a line attributed to Gandalf. the wizard from Tolkien’s world: “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.”.

For fans who connect Tolkien’s story to the corruption of power, the contrast is blunt. Thiel. for instance. has named his data analytics firm Palantir after the crystal ball used as a spying device by the traitorous wizard Saruman. He has also reportedly referred to his venture capital firm. the Founders Fund. as “the precious. ” which is what the twisted and covetous character Gollum calls the One Ring—an instrument of totalitarian power.

Many people who know Tolkien’s work see a warning running beneath those symbols: in the novels. the temptation to rule corrodes anyone who gives in. Thiel. however. has been criticized precisely because his choices appear to mirror the very possibility of authoritarian control and omniscience that Tolkien’s villains pursue.

Musk’s reading has drawn its own backlash, though it comes with a different kind of claim. In October, Musk suggested on X that Tolkien’s epic could be read as an anti-immigration, build-the-wall parable. He wrote. “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 added that they “were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility. but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.”.

The article of faith in Musk’s interpretation has met swift rejection on accuracy: the text here says the recollection is simply inaccurate. It also notes that Musk offered it as a defense of Islamophobic far-right UK agitator Tommy Robinson.

For Leo XIV, the encyclical’s center of gravity is the insistence that the human response is not mastery for its own sake. Gandalf’s message—doing what one can in the “fields that we know”—lands in a document that already portrays technocracy as a system that turns people into parts.

The punch of that choice is felt because the pope is speaking into a world where some prominent tech figures have been publicly drawn to the imagery of total power, even when other readers can see Tolkien’s novels as a critique of exactly that temptation.

Pope Leo XIV Magnifica humanitas artificial intelligence technocracy Tolkien J.R.R. Tolkien Gandalf The Lord of the Rings Peter Thiel Palantir Founders Fund Elon Musk Tommy Robinson cybersecurity not applicable