Stephen Colbert Must Be Ecstatic About His

For those of you who are not aware, comedian Stephen Colbert is a devout Catholic.

Also, it could be argued that he is the biggest Tolkien/Lord of the Rings geek ever. 

I can only imagine the glee he must have felt when Pope Leo XIV released an encyclical on artificial intelligence that quoted Gandalf

………

In sounding this call to both disarm and to build, Leo turns to “twentieth-century Catholic author” JRR Tolkien. Though he can’t quite bring himself to say that he’s quoting Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, that’s exactly what’s happening.

(The encyclical says only that the quote comes from “the words of a protagonist in one of [Tolkien’s] novels.” Though Pope Francis previously spoke of Tolkien’s work, this appears to be the first time that Tolkien has ever been quoted in the highest levels of the church’s official doctrinal publications.)

Gandalf says, in what is very much a theme of the entire Lord of the Rings:

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 moral and local action envisioned here, along with Tolkien’s suspicion of the dehumanizing effects of technology, clearly appealed to Leo.