Blessed are the wealthy?

American movie director, satirist and Catholic, Michael Moore, wrote an e-mail to his friends and the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to his website, just before he made his way to Mass a few Sundays ago. He had just got back from the Venice Film Festival where his new documentary called Capitalism: A Love Story had its premiere.

Michael Moore: Is capitalism a sin?

Moore, you may recall, was the director of the hard-hitting and bitingly critical movie Fahrenheit 9/11. He pulls no punches in this new documentary, blasting the “evils” of capitalism. The subject line of his e-mail reads: “For Those of You on Your Way to Church This Morning…a note from Michael Moore”.

“Friends,” he wrote, “I’d like to have a word with those of you who call yourselves Christians. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists etc can read along too, as much of what I have to say, I’m sure, can be applied to your own spiritual/ethical values.

“In my new film I speak for the first time in one of my movies about my own spiritual beliefs. I have always believed that one’s religious leanings are deeply personal and should be kept private. After all, we’ve heard enough yammerin’ in the past three decades about how one should ‘behave’, and I have to say I’m pretty burned out on pieties and platitudes, considering we [the United States] are a violent nation who invades other countries and punishes our own for having the audacity to fall on hard times.

“I’m also against any proselytising; I certainly don’t want you to join anything I belong to. Also, as a Catholic, I have much to say about the Church as an institution, but I’ll leave that for another day or movie.

“Amidst all the Wall Street bad guys and corrupt members of Congress exposed in Capitalism: A Love Story, I pose a simple question in the movie: ‘Is capitalism a sin?’ I go on to ask, ‘Would Jesus be a capitalist?’ Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1% to have more financial wealth than the 95% under them combined?

“I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha taught.”

Moore goes on: “All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what’s left for everyone to fight over.

“Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother’s and sister’s keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you’d have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

“I guess that’s bad news for us Americans. Here’s how we define ‘Blessed Are the Poor’: We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There’s a foreclosure filing once every 7,5 seconds. 14000 people every day lose their health insurance.

“At the same time, Wall Street bankers (‘Blessed Are the Wealthy’?) are amassing more and more loot — and they do their best to pay little or no income tax. Last year, Goldman Sachs’ tax rate was a mere 1%.

“Would Jesus approve of this? If not, why do we let such an evil system continue? It doesn’t seem you can call yourself a capitalist AND a Christian, because you cannot love your money AND love your neighbor when you are denying your neighbor the ability to see a doctor just so you can have a better bottom line. That’s called ‘immoral’ and you are committing a sin when you benefit at the expense of others.

“When you are in church this morning, please think about this. I am asking you to allow your ‘better angels’ to come forward. And if you are among the millions of Americans who are struggling to make it from week to week, please know that I promise to do what I can to stop this evil and I hope you’ll join me in not giving up until everyone has a seat at the table. Thanks for listening. I’m off to Mass in a few hours.”

There is no doubt that the recent investment banking scandal and perceptions of rewarding abject failure with huge bonuses as well as government bailouts of public companies in the Western World has cast the spotlight firmly on to the capitalist system.

It seems to me that an overhaul is necessary both in terms of practical viability as well as moral acceptability.

Clearly, Pope Benedict takes the same view, if we are to be guided by his many statements on poverty and the present economic crisis.