A Mooreish solution

It's not surprising that Michael Moore is a committed Catholic – the social teaching of the church reflects his views pretty closely

The Guardian, 12/10/09

The clip has become a hit on YouTube. In a discussion about Michael Moore's new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, Sean Hannity, a stupendously rightwing host on Fox News, invites the leftwing documentary-maker to classify himself as an "unapologetic socialist".

"Christian", Moore corrects him.

Taken aback, Hannity protests that he is too.

"I believe in what Jesus said", says Moore.

"So do I", Hannity quickly replies.

Moore then narrows it down. "You're a Catholic?"

"I'm a Catholic", agrees Hannity.

And yes, they both go to Mass each Sunday – which is no great surprise, this being America, and both men of Irish extraction. But when Moore asks Hannity to identify last week's gospel, Hannity is clearly shaken, and mumbles about having arrived at church late.

The gospel, it turns out, was about it being harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

In his new film Moore is firing some deadly shells into the heart of rightwing America by contesting the assumption that God is on the side of capitalism. In his broadside against free-market dogma and corporate greed, he harnesses two Catholic priests and a retired auxiliary bishop in his crusade, which focuses on the role of General Motors' management in the decline of his hometown of Flint, Michigan. The ironically named Capitalism: A Love Story chronicles the effects of economic dysfunction on vulnerable individuals and their families – what happens when profit is put before people, and individuals are treated as commodities.

Moore the anti-capitalist enragé gets his indignation, it turns out, not from an alienated youth buried in Gramsci, but from the nuns who taught him at school. And where did they get it? From Catholic teaching, of course – specifically the great social encyclicals of the popes from the late 19th century onwards, which are as bitter in their criticism of unbridled markets as they are in denouncing the response to it of state socialism.

Moore's fury is straight out of Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which deplored the way a large mass of people were kept in conditions "little better than slavery itself" by a minority of wealthy capitalists. Pope Leo laid out the solutions: just wages (based on the need of the worker, not the lowest the market could bear), the duty of the state to intervene to correct abuses, the spread of private property to the propertyless, and the right to form trade unions and negotiate decent wages. Rerum Novarum was heavily influenced by the speeches of a British cardinal, Edward Manning, who declared that "if the hours of labour have no other object but the gain of the employer, no working man can live a life worthy of a dignified human being".

What the popes, like Moore, have deplored is the belief that market forces should be left to themselves – an idea, of course, promoted by those who have most benefitted from lack of regulation. Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno – written in 1931, in the wake of the Wall St crash – deplores the belief that "the free play of rugged competition" could in some way lead to the proper ordering of the economy: "from this source as from a polluted spring have proceeded all the errors of the 'individualist' school", he warned. More recently, Pope John Paul II in 1991 deplored a "radical capitalistic ideology" which is fails to consider the impact of marginalisation and exploitation, and which "blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces".

Catholicism is not opposed to capitalism per se, but to the way in which, left to itself, the market commodifies and alienates human beings; and it especially opposes the ideology which makes of the market a kind of god and a human being merely a factor of production and consumption.

What Catholic social teaching advances is not socialism, for it resists the idea that the state should have a monopoly of capitalism, but a vigorous civil society which can act as a check on both state and market. In recent centuries, when capitalism mugged Christianity, charity has been too often portrayed as religious Republicans in the US too often see it – giving to good causes, but never questioning the system itself or its beneficiaries. But that is not how it was in the early centuries of the church, when bishops lambasted their rich neighbours for hoarding grain to increase prices while farmers and their families wept from hunger.

When Michael Moore tells Hannity the meaning of the gospel that the host couldn't recall – that "we'll be judged according to how we treat the least among us" – he was echoing a long Christian tradition, stretching back through the early church to Jesus' words to his disciples in Matthew 25. If we ignore the impact of our actions on the vulnerable – and that includes collateralised debt obligations and high-interest credit actions – it will not be enough to proclaim that the market will in turn right itself. As Bishop Basil put it in 368, "Wipe out the oppressive contract of usury ... You and all your wealth will share one death." It's vicious, radical, simplistic stuff – and quite Mooreish.