As a former devout Catholic, though, I'd like to shed some light on the second point. Catholicism puts a lot of stress on the difference between a temptation/inclination to sin ("concupiscence") and actually doing so, and to what extent you do something. Simply having doubts is no sin if you don't entertain them. Even voicing disagreements is probably just a venial sin (depends on context, etc.). Actively saying "the Church is wrong" and claiming you can still be a good Catholic without following everything the Magisterium says would be a mortal sin. Even many of the strictest Catholics don't necessarily agree with everything the Church says, and will complain about one issue or another to close friends, while reciting the party line should anyone else ask their opinion about it. I can largely relate to Tolkien's statement - even though he doesn't totally agree with the Church, he still has faith in its authority. This is because if the Church were mistaken about even the slightest point, it would undermine its infallible authority, so he'd have to go find a new philosophy altogether, and since none seems as convincing as Catholicism, he has no choice but to cling to his faith that the Church is actually correct in the end, even if he personally disagrees. This is extremely frustrating for obvious reasons, and his complaint is reminiscient of Peter's "Lord, to whom will we go?", likely on purpose.
The best analogy for a non-Catholic is that you're on a ship in a storm, the Captain is an idiot and might get everyone killed if you listen to him, but if you try to do anything about it, you're going to start a mutiny during a crisis and DEFINITELY get everyone killed, so even though there might be muttering amongst the crew, when push comes to shove they're going to follow the Captain's orders and not rebel. It's not a perfect analogy because the issue of infallibility doesn't come into play, but emotionally, it's a lot like that.
In his later writings, whatever his overall motivation for revising the earlier works, he changed a great deal of the more pagan elements to be more in line with Christian theology. I feel this is pretty self-evident, but if you want to debate that point I'll make a new thread, because it would require extensive quotation and discussion of specific examples and would derail this thread. In any case, assuming he did know about planetary metals (which we both agree is unlikely), the point is that I seriously doubt he would deliberately include occult elements...even though there are a LOT. More on that later
