That's both a very good description of Tolkien's struggles with orcs, and a writing style that feels out of place in an encyclopedia. The Halls of Mandos are described as a halfway house.

> J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, created what he came to feel was a moral dilemma for himself with his supposedly evil Middle-earth peoples like Orcs [...] so killing them would be wrong without very good reason. Orcs serve as the principal forces of the enemy in The Lord of the Rings, where they are slaughtered in large numbers in the battles of [...]

Admitting that there's a very wide diversity of beliefs under the "Roman Catholic" banner - historic Roman Catholic armies have been eager participants in well-documented battles for the past 1,500 or so years. I'd assume that Tolkien would have had a wide variety of perfectly historic Roman Catholic arguments to chose from, to justify his fictional slaughter.

(If I recall, the orcs slaughtered in LoTR are pretty much all soldier or near-soldiers. Do orc women, children, or other non-combatants ever appear in the story?)

In many ways, that Wikipedia article feels like a Hays Code-era whitewashing of Roman Catholicism.

Fascinating thank you. I was only aware of the surface level concern around the orcs.