You misunderstand me completely. I have no problem at all with the religious analysis, or drawing conclusions about how Catholicism affected JRRTs life or thinking. (I also find it distressing that the automatic assumption is that the objection is due to the mention of religion) My problem is with the continued, determined statements that this must have driven his decisions on the dates, when the scholarly records refute this.
The marked irony I see in all of this is the refutation of the possibility of this being coincidence, when that is the most frequent means of intervention by Eru in Arda. If Art is imitating life here, then this sort of serendipitous coincidence is exactly the way God works, and to deny the possibility of it being so is to take away from the glory of God.