In his first encyclical since becoming the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo mentioned “20th century Catholic author” JRR Tolkien. While he didn't directly say he was quoting Gandalf from “The Lord of the Rings,” the words belong to the character, as ArsTechnica notes.
The encyclical only states that the quote comes from “the words of a protagonist of one of the novels” of the British author.
Although Pope Francis himself has spoken about the work of Tolkien, a devout Catholic, this appears to be the first time the writer has ever been cited at the highest levels of the Catholic Church's official doctrinal publications, according to ArsTechnica.
Encyclicals represent one of the most important forms of teaching through which a pontiff addresses the 1.4 billion members of the Catholic Church.
“It is not given to us to rule all the waves of the world, but to do what is in our power to help those times in which we are placed, uprooting the evil from the fields that we know, so that those who will live after us have clean land to work,” says Pope Leo in the encyclical presented with billionaire Christopher Olah, one of the founders of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
The same words can be found in “The Last Counsel”, chapter IX of the novel “The Return of the King”, when Gandalf speaks in the council of Minas Tirith before the final offensive against Sauron.
Pope Leo used the Tolkien quote in a call to “disarm” AI
The encyclical entitled “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”) called for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” in the service of the common good.
“The word is powerful,” admitted the sovereign pontiff. But he said he intentionally chose the language of “disarmament,” “because this moment needs words capable of drawing attention, awakening consciences, and pointing the way forward for humanity.”
Today's artificial intelligence must be “liberated from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” the leader of the Catholic Church emphasized in the encyclical.
The 40,000-word document contains blunt criticism of AI-powered autonomous weapons, “neo-colonial attitudes” to data collection and the accumulation of “new forms of property such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructures and data”.
But the letter goes far beyond criticism, updating Catholic social teaching in a way that calls everyone to “build” — a term favored by the Silicon Valley elite popularized by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's 2020 essay, “It's Time to Build.”
In Leon's view, however, this “construction” extends beyond source code, startups, factories or homes. The sovereign pontiff calls for the creation of a “civilization of love” in which everyone works for the common good in their own sphere of life and in which technology does not dominate, exclude or circumvent humanity, but, on the contrary, serves and amplifies it.
