Is Peter Thiel the Target of Pope Leo's Gandalf quote?

Pope Leo's Gandalf quote arrived without warning, tucked inside a 40,000-word papal encyclical on artificial intelligence and technology. The document, newly released, cites exactly one literary character across its sprawling length. It is not a saint. It is not a church father. It is Gandalf the Grey, the pipe-smoking wizard of Middle-earth, dispensing wisdom from The Return of the King. The passage is a meditation on humble, local action: doing what one can in the time and place one is given, uprooting evil in the fields one actually knows.

The quote itself is beautiful. But here is the part the press release skipped. The Pope, born and raised in Chicago before spending decades in Peru, chose to spotlight the one fantasy author who functions as a kind of patron saint for Peter Thiel's entire techno-political empire.

A Wizard Enters the Vatican

The encyclical calls for what Leo terms a "civilization of love." The Gandalf citation underscores the importance of "small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization." The quote, drawn from The Return of the King, reads:

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 own, this is standard Tolkien. Noble. Grounded. But when you consider who the Pope might be speaking to, Pope Leo's Gandalf quote starts to look less like a random literary flourish and more like a deliberate theological counterpunch.

Thiel's Middle-earth Portfolio

He doesn't just enjoy Tolkien. But he has built an empire on the nomenclature of Tolkien's works, and it's a pattern that is impossible to miss once you start looking.

• Palantir, the AI and data analytics giant, takes its name from the seeing-stones of Middle-earth.
• Mithril Capital Management borrows from the dwarven metal of Moria.
• Valar Ventures nods to the godlike beings of Tolkien's cosmology.
• Rivendell One and Lembas LLC round out the portfolio with Elvish references.

Thiel's protégés follow the same naming convention. Vice President J.D. Vance, a self-described Tolkien devotee, once founded a venture firm called Narya, after one of the Elvish rings of power. Palmer Luckey, the defense tech entrepreneur, launched Anduril and then, Fortune reported last year, a digital bank called Erebor, another name for the Lonely Mountain where Smaug hoarded his gold.

Business Insider noted as far back as 2012 that Thiel's inner circle jokingly referred to his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, as "The Precious."

More Than Just Fandom

But it's not just branding. Thiel has spent years articulating a worldview that merges tech accelerationism with apocalyptic Christianity, and that worldview now has a direct collision course with the Vatican.

The Antichrist and the AI Race

Thiel has been touring the world with a lecture series about the Antichrist. The talks, which took him to Rome earlier this year, became so contentious that Catholic universities initially associated with the event denied any official involvement, according to The Associated Press. Recordings of the private lectures leaked. The Guardian summarized them, noting Thiel's belief that "the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the Antichrist."

And here is where Pope Leo's Gandalf quote gains its sharpest edge. Thiel has specifically worried about a "woke American pope" making common cause with a "woke American president," a partnership he views as potentially ushering in the very global domination he fears.

Thiel's framework, laid out across his lectures and a 2025 New York Times podcast interview, rests on several convictions:

• The Antichrist works through global unification and centralized control.
• Regulatory agencies like the FDA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission represent this consolidating power, effectively governing entire industries worldwide.
• "Peace and safetyism," the impulse to regulate and protect, is the slogan of the Antichrist, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:3.

Thiel's removing AI's guardrails. But he argued that the alternative to unleashing artificial intelligence is "total stagnation," and people and governments who regulate AI, who call for caution, become, in his framework, aligned with the forces of the Antichrist.

The Regulatory Antichrist

Pope Leo's encyclical calls for the exact opposite approach. It demands the "disarming" of AI. It sketches a vision of technology built not through world-bestriding ambition but through small, local acts of love and charity. The Gandalf quote serves as the literary hinge for this entire argument. Leo seems to be saying to Thiel and his Silicon Valley friends that there is another way to build, a quieter way worked out in the fields one actually knows.

Not Shade. Proclamation.

But that's a blunt question. The Catholic Herald asked whether the encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, was aimed at Peter Thiel's techno-political empire, and tech blogger Simon Willison wondered if Pope Leo's Gandalf quote was throwing a little shade at Thiel.

But that framing misses something. Those who've watched this Pope know he doesn't operate in the register of shade, and when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over military action in Iran, he was clear about his role. "The mission of the Church is to proclaim the Gospel, to preach peace," Leo said. "I simply hope to be listened to because of the value of the word of God.

The Gandalf citation is not an insult. It is an invitation. It reaches into a shared cultural resource, Tolkien's legendarium, and offers a competing interpretation. Where Thiel and his circle see in Middle-earth a license for technological disruption, battles, and global-scale action, the Pope points back to the story's actual conclusion. In Tolkien's world, it is the "little people," and ultimately the wretched outcast Gollum, who save the world from the wars and machines of the great. The hobbits endure. The humble persist.

37;000 words into the document, the encyclical asks the tech aristocrats of Silicon Valley to abandon their dreams of transhumanism and artificial superintelligences and to replace those dreams with something more recognizably human. Pope Leo's Gandalf quote is not a weapon. It is a sermon. And Peter Thiel, whether he knows it or not, is sitting in the front pew.