Father Mike Schmitz

He's an image of Christ, the priest.

You have Aragorn, who is the king, and he's going to take his throne at some point.

He's exiled in many ways, but at some point he's going to take his throne.

So here's an image of Jesus Christ, the king.

You also have Frodo, who's the hobbit, who carries the ring.

And in Tolkien's work, he said that he actually, Tolkien said about the Lord of the Rings, he said that it's a religious and it's specifically Catholic work.

So Frodo is the ring bearer and ring in Middle Earth and in the whole book series, the ring symbolizes the corruptive power of sin.

And so here's the one who's carrying the corruptive power of sin, carrying the ring in order to destroy it.

In the process, it costs him something.

So here is Frodo, the ring bearer in terms of like, you know, here's Jesus, the cross bearer.

And so you can see that in that work of fiction, there are three images or three ways you can see, oh, this is a Christ figure, this is a Christ figure, this is a Christ figure.

In a similar way, you have this book of Revelation chapter 12, this woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head with a crown of 12 stars, who gives birth to this child as, yeah, the faithful remnant of Israel, the early church or the church itself, as well as Mary, the mother of God.

And so all of those are legitimate interpretations of this.

Now, one thing to kind of keep in mind, though, if you want to read an incredible story about Our Lady of Guadalupe, there's this story that dates back hundreds of years around what's now known as Mexico City, where people had come to the New World.

Christians had come to the New World, in fact, trying to bring the gospel of Jesus.

And it was, after maybe 50 years or so, made a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand conversions.

And there was some kind of stranglehold that prevented the gospel from really thriving in the new world here in this land, essentially.

You know, if you know anything about the ancient world in Central America, is that it was dominated in a lot of ways by human sacrifice.

It was dominated by what you might call, by this point, demonic oppression and whatnot.

And at one point, there's a man named Juan Diego, and this young woman appeared to him.