alt Hacker News> 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.
Your criticism of Catholicism is valid, but regardless: this dilemma of Tolkien is real, and well-documented (e.g. in his letters, etc).
He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.
Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".