Two thumbs up for social justice: Patrick McCormick picks his four all-time favorite films that call for a more just world. (culture in context).

THIS YEAR RERUM NOVARUM TURNS 111, AND BECAUSE Rome has not issued any new social encyclical on this odd anniversary of Catholic social thought, I'm offering a short list of my favorite social justice movies. After all, reading the church's official social documents can be tough work, so it's nice to know that some of our favorite films teach the same lessons. So warm up your VCR and prepare for a short film course in social justice.

Any catalog of social justice flicks has to start with John Ford's 1940 rendition of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's odyssey of sharecropping Oakies driven into diaspora by the dust bowl and the Depression. Grapes is the American film about poverty, class, and the struggle for economic justice. The Depression was this country's high-water mark for poverty, unemployment, and despair, and tens of millions of out-of-work and down-on-their-luck Americans recognized their own plight in Steinbeck's saga about dirt farmers scrapping for a job and a meal. Henry Fonda's Tom Joad was a populist Everyman traveling on the underside of the American dream, and Jane Darwell's Ma Joad was the weary and familiar face of every widow, orphan, and stranger forced out onto the road by hard times.

Catholic social teaching demands solidarity with the poor, not easy in a nation where the divide between the haves and the have-nots has grown so vast. In an increasingly separate and unequal society, the poor can become an abstraction, an invisible race that does not shop in our malls, live in our neighborhoods, or haunt our consciences. The Grapes of Wrath puts a face on the poor, the face of ordinary people, and asks why the Joads (or anyone) are poor and what can be done about it.

Watching Ford's film pulls us momentarily into the Joads' pilgrimage through the wasteland of the Depression and lets us sample the diet of despair and injustice served up to those left behind by an indifferent economy. And if the ranks of America's poor have dwindled since The Grapes of Wrath was made, the film reminds us of the millions and millions of migrants, farmworkers, and sweatshop employees holding up the underbelly of our global economy.

FRANK CAPRA'S IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE IS MY SECOND PICK for a great social justice film. Capra, who showed a preferential option for the downtrodden in films like Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, cast Jimmy Stewart in this 1946 parable about individualism and monopolies. In Capra's film the fate of the sleepy village of Bedford Falls is to be decided by a contest between George Bailey (Stewart) of the Bailey Brothers' Savings and Loan and a greedy banker named Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore). Potter, who makes Scrooge look like Mother Teresa, has a tentacle in nearly every pocket in town and a covetous eye on all the rest. Only the one-horse Bailey S&L offers the working-class town folks any hope of getting out from under Potter's thumb. But all these dreams depend on George Bailey proving to be a good neighbor to the people of Bedford Falls.

Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI both decried "economic imperialism" that resulted from laissez faire capitalism's tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, and the U.S. Catholic bishops in their 1986 economic pastoral letter called for an economic democracy allowing everyone to participate in the economies that shaped their lives. Meanwhile, Catholic social teaching has long criticized an individualistic ethic that ignored our ties and duties to those around us.

During the last third of Capra's film we see two visions of Bedford Falls. In the first, Potter's unchecked imperialism has fashioned a purgatorial company town populated by dispirited serfs toiling and dying in their own potter's field. In the second, George Bailey's concern for others has frustrated Potter's machinations and created a vibrant community of friends and neighbors whose communitarian spirit has produced a wonderful life.

NORMA RAE IS MY THIRD nominee for a top social justice film. Sally Field won her first Oscar playing the title role in Martin Ritt's 1979 tale about a working-class cotton mill employee who helps start a union shop. She brings a gritty determination to her portrayal of an overworked single mother who takes on her employers in a struggle for better wages and working conditions.

At first, Norma seems an unlikely labor leader, but under the tutelage of union organizer Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Leibman) she comes to see the injustice of her situation and begins educating and organizing her coworkers. Ridiculed, harassed, and arrested, Norma resists increasing pressures and threats aimed at dissuading her and others from a union vote and proves victorious in her battle for workers' rights.

From Leo XIII to John Paul II, Catholic social thought has backed the right to unionize and recognized that workers must often fight for their rights to just wages and safe working conditions. And since John XXIII, the church has argued that agricultural laborers and sweatshop employees toiling in the basement of our global village have these same rights.

Released when the Rust Belt and Reaganomics were devouring union wages and benefits, and farmworkers and those in the service industry had little or no protection from corporate greed, Norma Rae offers a reinvigorated vision of unions, a Mother Jones for the agricultural, service, and factory workers in the South and throughout the developing world. And it acknowledges that women are workers, too--indeed, that they do two thirds of the world's labor, while getting only one tenth of its pay.

MY FINAL CANDIDATE IN THIS SHORT list is Dead Man Walking, Tim Robbins' 1995 film version of Sister Helen Prejean's account of her death row ministry. Susan Sarandon took home an Oscar for her portrayal of the nun who becomes the spiritual director of a man convicted of the brutal slaying of two Louisiana teens, and Sean Penn mesmerizes us as the brooding, self-serving, but ultimately human monster who is to be executed for his part in these crimes.

Unlike other death penalty films, Dead Man never pretends Matthew Poncelet (Penn) is innocent or that his guilt is mitigated by a brutal childhood. Nor does it flinch before the quandary of Prejean's conflicting moral duties to the killer and his victims' families. Still, Sarandon's nun wades through the morass of moral ambiguity guided by her conviction that Christ does not sanction the death penalty, that the beast who has done these things is also fashioned in the image and likeness of God.

Since Vatican II, Catholic social thought has been rethinking traditional teachings on war and violence and strengthening its preferential option for peace. In response to the escalating violence of modern warfare, the bishops at the council called for a reexamination of the just war theory and acknowledged the courage and virtue of Christian pacifists and conscientious objectors. More recently, John Paul II and the U.S. bishops have repeatedly criticized the death penalty as contributing to a cycle of violence and urged government leaders to abandon this practice.

In Dead Man Walking, Prejean gives voice to the church's evolving conscience on the question of the death penalty and offers a biblical critique of a state-sanctioned violence that too many American Catholics continue to support.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good social justice film may not be worth a whole encyclical, but it could contain a handful of prophetic insights. An evening spent with the best efforts of Ford and Capra or some of their contemporary descendants may not teach us everything we need to know about Catholic social thought, but it wouldn't be a bad way to celebrate an anniversary.

By PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. This is his 100th consecutive column in U.S. CATHOLIC. Congratulations and our heartfelt thanks, Pat!