In ‘The Power and the Glory’, A Whiskey Priest Seeks Redemption
‘The Power and the Glory’, by Graham Greene, reviewed.
Graham Greene called the oppression of Catholics in Tabasco, Mexico the ‘fiercest persecution of religion since the reign of Elizabeth.’ Throughout the 1930s, the ‘Camisas Rojas’ of governor Tomás Garrido Canabal killed priests and laypeople in the name of socialism. (They also banned tombstones and booze.) Greene was in Mexico to see this and witness the other sins of the régime. He wrote of his hatred for the country in the travel book The Lawless Roads; but he also described his growing faith, which flowed from seeing peasants’ devotion. He said that he could not help but feel ‘profoundly moved.’
This is the background to The Power and the Glory. Its hero is an unnamed ‘whiskey priest’. The other priests have fled the state or renounced their faith, taking wives and pensions in recompense. But the whiskey priest has chosen to stay; and the book follows his clumsy, reluctant attempts to minister to the people. He is hounded all the while by an (unnamed) lieutenant, whose hatred of the Church is total. As he makes his way through Tabasco, the priest struggles with his drinking, his past sins (which include the fathering of a child) and the source of his present guilt: the lieutenant is taking a hostage from each village and killing him if he does not denounce the priest.
The book follows the priest’s clumsy, reluctant attempts to minister to the people.
If there is a single central theme, it is one that is common in Greene’s work: redemption. By his own admission, the priest is far from admirable. He joined the Church out of pride and not a need to serve, hoping it would bring him wealth and prestige. In siring a child through a peasant, Maria, he has broken his vow of celibacy. And on top of all this, he is a coward. What nuances the struggles of the priest is that he knows he is a sinner. Indeed the weight of his sins is almost too much to bear: he wants to be caught. But he cannot quite bring himself to give himself up, since it would lead to his death. Thus it would be suicide once-removed, or ‘suicide by cop’, as have learned to call it. And that is a grave sin — in fact the only unforgivable sin, as Henry Scobie points out in The Heart of the Matter, another of Greene’s Catholic novels.
The priest is far from admirable. He joined the Church out of pride and not a need to serve.
The Power and the Glory is written in the elegant prose that is characteristic of Greene, and its structure there are clear parallels with the Biblical narrative. Believing the newborn Jesus to be a threat to his rule, Herod the Great, king of Judea, ordered the killing of children under two born in and around Bethlehem. In much the same way, the lieutenant orders the capture or killing of those whose faith he perceives to threaten his authority. And like the peasant Catholics of Tabasco, the early Christians were persecuted. Christ Himself died a political prisoner: crucified as an enemy of the state.
Within The Power and the Glory there is a parallel tale, told by an unnamed mother to her child. The story concerns a Christian martyr called Juan. But the boy, Luis, finds the story uninteresting. He finds Juan unlikeable. And to a point, Luis is like us, dismayed by the cowardice of the priest. But Luis changes his mind at the ending of the tale, for its power and glory is all in its ending. And so it is with Greene’s story. As the narrator of Matthieu Kassovitz’ La Haine points out: ‘C’est pas la chute; c’est l’atterrisage.’
