What makes §213 of Magnifica Humanitas such a pointed gesture is not just that Pope Leo XIV quotes Tolkien, but which Tolkien he quotes, and what political/cultural terrain that quotation crosses in doing so. Three claimants to Middle-earth, three radically different readings.
The Pope's Tolkien (§213). Leo XIV pulls from Gandalf's speech at the Last Debate 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." He then glosses it in his own voice: "The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization." The context is an encyclical on AI and the threat of dehumanization, and the rhetorical move is anti-mastery: against the demiurgic temptation to seize the levers of history, against the despair that says ordinary people can't resist large systems. The reading is humble, communitarian, eschatologically patient — closer to Tolkien's own letters than to most political appropriations of him. Note also the Pope's choice of speech: not Aragorn's coronation, not the destruction of the Ring, but Gandalf counseling restraint and stewardship.
The Italian right's Tolkien. This is where the irony of the encyclical sharpens, because Italy is where Tolkien-as-political-text has the deepest, strangest pedigree. The youth wing of Italy's post-fascist movement consciously adopted the language and symbolism of Tolkien's world to replace its own disgraced ideological aesthetic — swastikas out, Celtic crosses in, with the 1970s "Hobbit Camps" as the formative institution. The framing was set early by Elémire Zolla's preface to the first Italian edition, which read the novel as a hymn to tradition, Christianity and purity. Meloni rose through that culture — she called Lord of the Rings "our Bible" in a 2002 interview, posed next to a Gandalf statue as youth minister in 2008, and her government's culture ministry recently funded a Tolkien exhibition at Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art partly as a "gift" to her and her party. The reading here is the opposite of the Pope's: Tolkien as defender of bounded, organic, hierarchical civilization against the corrosions of modernity; the Shire as homeland to be defended against invasion; Aragorn's coronation as model for restored sovereign authority. As John Last observes, this is itself a misreading — Tolkien cared about the Shire and "that idea of sort of small communitarian, simple living," and the grand narratives of statehood the neo-fascists endorse are fundamentally at odds with the simple Shire folk. Tolkien disliked Hitler, distrusted state grandeur, and was a small-c Catholic conservative — much closer, in temperament, to what Leo XIV is doing with him.
Thiel's Tolkien. And then Palantir, which is the most baroque case of all because it doesn't even pretend to read Tolkien as moral instruction. In 2003 Thiel co-founded a CIA-In-Q-Tel-funded surveillance software company and named it after the palantíri — the seeing-stones that, in Tolkien's text, the Dark Lord uses "to spy on, demoralize, seduce, and corrupt his enemies," most notably Saruman. Palantir is one of six Thiel firms drawing on Middle-earth — alongside Valar Ventures and Rivendell One LLC — and the Palo Alto offices are informally known as "The Shire". The branding is, on its face, self-aware villain cosplay: the palantír is the tool that corrupts the wise, the device through which Sauron whispers into Saruman's mind. You could read this as ironic transgression, or — more interestingly — as an admission that the company sees itself on the power side of Tolkien's universe rather than the stewardship side. The seeing-stone is a fantasy of total vision, exactly the demiurgic ambition Gandalf in §213 is warning Merry against.
The three positions stacked together. Leo XIV's choice of passage starts to look less accidental in this light. He picks the moment in Tolkien where Gandalf explicitly rejects the politics of mastery — we are not here to master all the tides of the world — and frames it as the answer to AI-era dehumanization. That single sentence sits at the precise pressure point between:
- the Italian right's reading of Tolkien as a charter for restoring bounded, sovereign, traditional civilizational mastery,
- and Thiel's reading of Tolkien as branding for the surveillance apparatus that does attempt to master the tides of the world through total informational vision.
The Pope is, in effect, reclaiming Tolkien from both — without naming either. He is taking the most-claimed text of the contemporary right (claimed by Meloni's milieu as cultural ancestor, claimed by Thiel's milieu as aesthetic property) and using it to articulate exactly the position those movements have most thoroughly abandoned: anti-mastery, anti-grand-gesture, fidelity in the fields you actually know, stewardship rather than dominion. As one Tolkien commentator put it, Tolkien's heroes were those who selflessly tended to the "fields that they knew," seeking not to dominate but rather only to steward and guide — while his villains strove for complete sovereignty, grasping for power and dominion that was never theirs to claim.
There's a further wrinkle worth noting: Leo XIV is American, the first American pope, writing in an encyclical about AI at a moment when American technology capital (Thiel's wing of it especially) is openly courting both the U.S. and Italian right and producing a coherent ideology that fuses surveillance infrastructure with civilizational-restoration rhetoric. Picking Gandalf's anti-mastery speech as the moral climax of an AI encyclical is not a neutral literary flourish. It's a fairly precise theological intervention into a contested text, against two specific (and increasingly allied) political projects that read it the other way.
Whether the intervention lands depends on whether anyone in those camps is reading the encyclical — but as rhetorical positioning, choosing that Tolkien quote in that document at this moment is about as targeted as a papal citation gets.