NC Register portal (June 8, 2026) — Joseph Pearce, a commentator for the NC Register, offers a fawning defense of the first encyclical of the usurper Robert Prevost, who styles himself “Leo XIV.” The encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, addresses artificial intelligence and new technology. Pearce celebrates the fact that this document quotes J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional character Gandalf alongside the writings of popes. Pearce argues that both Tolkien and “Leo XIV” share a “Eucharistic spirituality” and that this common ground allows them to properly judge technology. He further claims that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” and that the character Gandalf represents a servant of God. The article promotes the idea that the “civilization of love” is built through “small and steadfast acts of fidelity” rather than “spectacular gestures,” and insists that the Eucharist is the necessary spiritual foundation for resisting dehumanization. This entire edifice is constructed upon the authority of a manifest heretic and apostate who has no legitimate office in the Church of Christ.
A Heretic’s Encyclical: The Illegitimacy of “Leo XIV” and the Nullity of Magnifica Humanitas
The foundational and insurmountable problem with the article by Joseph Pearce, and with the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas itself, is the utter lack of authority possessed by the individual who issued it. Robert Prevost, who has usurped the name “Leo XIV,” is not the Pope. He is not the successor of St. Peter. He possesses no jurisdiction, no teaching authority, and no right to bind the faithful. As the Church has always taught, a manifest heretic loses his office automatically, ipso facto, by the very fact of his manifest heresy, without any declaration from the Church. This is the teaching of St. Robert Bellarmine in De Romano Pontifice: “The fifth true opinion is that a Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church” (Defense of Sedevacantism). The line of usurpers beginning with John XXIII has been marked by the public propagation of heresies condemned by the perennial Magisterism. John XXIII convoked the apostasy of Vatican II. Paul VI promulgated the sacrilegious “new Mass” and the heresy of religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae. John Paul II, the false “canonizer” of heretics and apostates, engaged in acts of idolatry at Assisi. Benedict XVI, while retaining some outward forms, never retracted the conciliar errors and continued to recognize the legitimacy of the post-conciliar abomination. Francis, the antipope who “canonized” John Henry Newman — a man whose doctrine of the evolution of dogma is pure Modernism — and who promoted the Pachamama idolatry in the Vatican, was a manifest heretic and apostate. Robert Prevost, “Leo XIV,” continues in this same line. He has never retracted Vatican II. He has never condemned the heresies of religious liberty, ecumenism, or the cult of man. He continues to occupy the Vatican apparatus, the very structures that have been the instrument of the destruction of the Faith. His encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is therefore not a document of the Catholic Church. It is a document of the conciliar sect, a paramasonic structure that has hijacked the outward forms of the Church while emptying them of all Catholic content. To treat it as possessing any authority, to quote it alongside the true popes, is to legitimize the greatest usurpation in the history of Christendom.
The Quotation of Gandalf: A Symptom of Conciliar Infantilization
That “Leo XIV” would quote a fictional wizard — Gandalf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — in an encyclical is not merely curious; it is a devastating indictment of the intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of the conciliar sect. An encyclical, in the true sense of the term, is a solemn document of the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Vicar of Christ. It draws its authority from the promise of Christ: “He who hears you hears Me” (Luke 10:16). It is to be rooted in Sacred Scripture, Tradition, and the perennial teaching of the Church. To place the words of a fictional character from a fantasy novel alongside the solemn teaching of the popes is to reduce the Magisterium to the level of literary commentary. It is to treat the Vicar of Christ’s teaching as equivalent to the musings of a Oxford professor writing fantasy literature. This is not elevation of culture; it is the debasement of the sacred.
Pearce attempts to justify this by claiming that Tolkien was “a lifelong and devout Catholic” and that The Lord of the Rings is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” Even if we were to grant this characterization — and it is highly questionable given the naturalistic and romantic tendencies in Tolkien’s work — it does not follow that the words of a fictional character in a fantasy novel belong in an encyclical. The Church has always been judicious in her use of non-scriptural sources. The Fathers and Doctors of the Church are quoted because of their recognized sanctity and their authoritative role in the development of doctrine. The writings of pagan philosophers are occasionally referenced insofar as they contain elements of natural truth. But a fictional wizard? This is unprecedented in the history of papal documents, and for good reason. It reveals a Church that has lost confidence in her own supernatural sources — Scripture, Tradition, the Fathers, the Magisterium — and must resort to the crutch of popular culture to make her message “relevant.”
The quotation itself — “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” — is a platitude of naturalistic humanism. It is the philosophy of the “little man” who cannot change the world, so he tends his own garden. This is not Catholic teaching. The Catholic teaching is that we are called to be saints, to conquer the world for Christ, to “master all the tides of the world” through the grace of God and the authority of His Church. “Have confidence, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33), Christ said. And again: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). The Church’s mission is not to tend the Shire; it is to convert the world. The Gandalf quotation, far from being a profound insight, is a capitulation to the very globalism and technological tyranny that the encyclical purports to address. It says, in effect: “You cannot defeat the global powers, so just be good in your little corner.” This is the antithesis of the Catholic missionary spirit, the spirit of the Crusades, the spirit of the great missionaries who carried the Faith to the ends of the earth.
The “Civilization of Love”: A Modernist Slogan
Pearce, following “Leo XIV,” speaks of the “civilization of love” being built through “the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity.” This phrase, “civilization of love,” is not Catholic terminology. It is a modernist slogan, popularized by Paul VI and repeated ad nauseam by John Paul II and his successors. It is a naturalistic replacement for the true Catholic concept: the Kingdom of Christ. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism and laicism of the modern world. He taught that Christ reigns over all nations, that His Kingdom encompasses the entire human race, and that rulers and states have the duty to publicly honor and obey Christ. “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” (Pius XI, Quas Primas, quoting Leo XIII). The “civilization of love” is a pale, naturalistic substitute for the social Kingship of Christ. It reduces the public reign of Christ to a vague sentiment of human solidarity. It is the language of the United Nations, not of the Catholic Church.
Furthermore, the emphasis on “small and steadfast acts of fidelity” as the means of building this “civilization” is a subtle denial of the necessity of the Church’s social authority. The Church does not merely call individuals to private virtue; she claims the right and duty to govern societies, to issue laws, to direct nations to their supernatural end. “The Church, established by Christ as a perfect society, demands for itself by a right belonging to it, which it cannot renounce, full freedom and independence from secular authority” (Pius XI, Quas Primas). The Gandalf-inspired localism of Magnifica Humanitas is a retreat from this claim. It is the philosophy of a Church that has accepted its marginalization in the world, that no longer dares to speak of Christ’s social Kingship, and that contents itself with encouraging individuals to be “faithful” in their private lives while the world burns.
The Eucharist Without the Sacrifice: A Modernist Distortion
Both Pearce and “Leo XIV” speak of the Eucharist as the foundation of the needed spirituality. Pearce quotes Tolkien’s description of the Blessed Sacrament as “the one great thing to love on earth” and draws a parallel between the Eucharist and the lembas (elvish waybread) in The Lord of the Rings. On the surface, this might seem orthodox. But the critical question is: which Eucharist? The conciliar sect has destroyed the theology and liturgy of the Most Holy Sacrifice. The “new Mass” promulgated by Paul VI in 1969 is not the Catholic Mass. It is a Protestantized assembly, a “table of communion” that denies the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice. The Catholic Mass, as defined by the Council of Session XXII, Canon 2, is a true and proper sacrifice, propitiatory for the sins of the living and the dead. The “new Mass” was deliberately crafted to minimize this doctrine, to emphasize the “meal” aspect, and to make it acceptable to Protestants. To speak of “Eucharistic spirituality” in the context of the conciliar sect is to speak of a Eucharist that is either doubtful or entirely invalid.
Moreover, the entire framework of Magnifica Humanitas is naturalistic. It addresses artificial intelligence as a “social issue,” placing it in the lineage of Rerum Novarum and subsequent social encyclicals. But the true crisis of the modern world is not technological; it is spiritual. The true crisis is the apostasy of the conciliar sect, the destruction of the Mass, the propagation of heresies, and the abandonment of the supernatural. Pius XI understood this clearly: “This kind of outpouring of evil has afflicted the whole world because very many have removed Jesus Christ and His most holy law from their customs, from private, family, and public life” (Quas Primas). The encyclical of “Leo XIV” does not identify the true source of the crisis — the removal of Christ from society, the destruction of His Church, the apostasy of her leaders. Instead, it focuses on artificial intelligence, a symptom, and proposes a naturalistic remedy — “small acts of fidelity” and “Eucharistic spirituality” — without addressing the root cause. This is like treating a fever while ignoring the cancer that causes it.
The Silence on the True Remedy
What is entirely absent from both Pearce’s commentary and the encyclical it celebrates is any mention of the true remedy for the evils of the modern world. There is no call for the conversion of Russia to the Catholic Faith — not the vague “conversion” of the Fatima message, which is a Masonic operation designed to promote ecumenism with schismatic Orthodoxy (False Fatima Apparitions), but true conversion to the one true Church. There is no call for the social Kingship of Christ, for the recognition of Christ’s authority over all nations and all aspects of life. There is no call for the restoration of the true Mass, the Immemorial Roman Rite, as the center of Catholic worship. There is no call for the condemnation of the heresies of Vatican II — religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality, the cult of man. There is no call for the recognition that the conciliar “popes” are manifest heretics who have lost their office and that the faithful must seek out true priests and bishops who maintain the integral Catholic Faith.
Instead, we are offered a warm, fuzzy meditation on a fictional wizard, a call to “small acts of fidelity,” and an appeal to “Eucharistic spirituality” — all within the framework of a conciliar sect that has abandoned the Faith. This is not the Catholic response to the modern world. The Catholic response is the response of Pius XI: “If men were ever to recognize Christ’s royal authority over themselves, both privately and publicly, then unheard-of blessings would flow upon the whole society, such as due freedom, order, and tranquility, and concord and peace” (Quas Primas). The Catholic response is the response of Pius IX, who condemned the errors of modern liberalism in the Syllabus of Errors and declared that the Roman Pontiff “can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” is an error worthy of condemnation (Proposition 80). The Catholic response is the response of St. Pius X, who condemned Modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” in Pascendi Dominici Gregis and Lamentabili Sane Exitu.
Joseph Pearce, in his enthusiasm for “Leo XIV” and Gandalf, has demonstrated the depth of the conciliar captivity. He cannot see that the emperor has no clothes, that the encyclical has no authority, that the “Eucharist” it promotes is a counterfeit, and that the “civilization of love” it envisions is a naturalistic parody of the Kingdom of Christ. He has placed his faith in a usurper and a fictional wizard, while the true Church — the Church of all ages, the Church of the martyrs and the confessors, the Church that built Christendom — endures in the faithful who refuse the conciliar apostasy and cling to the integral Catholic Faith.
The faithful are not called to tend the Shire. They are called to conquer the world for Christ the King. They are not called to quote Gandalf. They are called to proclaim the Gospel, to offer the true Mass, to administer the true sacraments, and to recognize no authority on earth — not the United Nations, not the global corporations, and certainly not the usurper in the Vatican — above the authority of Jesus Christ and His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Non possumus — we cannot do otherwise.
Source:
Why Pope Leo Quoted Tolkien’s Gandalf (ncregister.com)
Date: 08.06.2026