Billy Kangas over at Patheos unearthed a message Pope Francis gave in 2008 using Lord of the Rings to illustrate his point. The relevant part, translated via Google Translate:
Mankind always conceived as a way of life; man as a traveler who, when born is started, and throughout its existence, meets people or situations that put back on track (sometimes with a mission, others with a crisis). In the Bible this reality is constant: Abraham is called to stand in the way “without knowing where he was going”; God’s people sets out to free the Egyptians. So in the history or mythology of other peoples Aeneas, to the destruction of Troy, overcomes the temptation to stay and rebuild the city, taking his father slippers, begins the climb up the mountain whose end shall be the foundation of Rome . Other mythological stories show the human journey and return home to the primordial belonging. So if Ulysses or so poetically expressed by Hölderlin in his Ode on the return home. Tolkien, in contemporary literature, takes Bilbo and Frodo in the image of man who is called to walk and heroes know and act, walking the drama going on between good and evil. The “man on the road” implies a dimension of hope; “Enter” hope. Throughout human history and mythology that man is not a still, stagnant being, but “on track”, called “vocado”-hence the term vocation, and when you enter this dynamic stresses then vanishes as a person or corrupted. Moreover, the set off is rooted in an inner restlessness that impels man to “get out of it”, to experience the “exodus of itself.” There is something outside and in us that calls us to perform the way. Exit, walk, conduct, accepting the open and give the shelter … this is the way.