What I Am Reading: "The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene

For my next adventure into the 1930s, I read one of Graham Greene's most-praised books. Greene apparently divided his works into his "entertainments" and his more serious works on Catholicism, and this is the first of the latter that I have read. I wanted to challenge myself a bit politically: most of the 1930s books, both fiction and non-, that I have read recently have had to do with the fight against fascism. This book, on the other hand, is about the repression of Catholics by Mexican leftists. You might not know it, however, from the novel alone.

The novel is about a "whiskey priest," meaning a priest who is not very holy (drinking and a love child), traveling around an unnamed Mexican state that had suppressed Catholicism and driven out all of its priests, or else subdued them through forced marriage and socialization into society. The priest, who remains unnamed, has an optional escape foiled in the first chapters, before we even know who he is. He then decides to stay longer in the state, as he is its last priest who has not surrendered, been executed, or fled into exile. The book explores his motivations for doing so, including a desire to repent for having been a social-climber and careerist prior to the suppression of the Church, and a fatalistic belief that it is important to suffer to do God's work.

He is pursued by an also-unnamed police lieutenant, nursing a lifelong hatred of the Church, who wants future generations to benefit from being raised in the truth of "a vacant universe and a cooling world." The lieutenant takes hostages from villages he believes the priest might visit, and shoots them if the priest is proven to have been there without the villagers alerting the authorities. Eventually, the priest's strong sense of duty, or possibly death wish, lures him out of a hard-won sanctuary over the mountains in the neighboring province to minister to a dying man: an American gunslinger and offscreen character who has repeatedly been mentioned as the other fugitive the police are chasing.

A lot of the religious material in the novel is far enough outside of my experience that it doesn't resonate with me, but the priest does say a lot about the messiness of the real world compared to the perfectionist preferences of the uncompromising believers. This comes up when the priest is imprisoned for possessing liquor, his true identity undiscovered. He meets a woman in the communal cell who was arrested for possessing a religious image, and the woman expects him to be much more condemnatory of the other criminals and lowlives in the cell. When she complains about other prisoners having sex in the cell, he tells her,

"Such a lot of beauty [in the cell]. Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in the corner - to them. It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint's eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can't afford to."

Later, when the priest escapes in the comparative safety of the next province, he ministers to the people, and wishes that he could give them in confession the nuanced, forgiving counsel that reflects his experience with the messy lives of the real world. However, he finds himself only able to deliver the same distant, haughty platitudes that he was versed in prior to his ordeal as a fugitive. Perhaps it is this unwanted change that informs his decision to travel into an obvious trap to minister to the dying American?

I said that the book wasn't as political as it could be; there are obvious signs of the leftist or socialist tendencies of the state authorities, such as the Red Shirts and the churches transformed into the "Syndicate of Workers and Peasants" and such. However, the ideological motivations of the government receive little discussion other than the lieutenant's atheism, and some socratic discussion between the priest and the lieutenant about how empowering and educating the poor would make it more difficult for them to get into heaven. Apparently, according to his subsequent travelogue The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene hated Mexico, despite journeying there explicitly to create a novel about the repression of Catholics at the time. Perhaps this dislike is why the book isn't very polemical or explicitly condemnatory of the larger Mexican context. Interestingly, a side-show about a teen being read a book about Mexican Catholic martyrs by his mother ends with the teen counting the priest and other martyrs alongside such romantic, dead revolutionaries as Zapata, Villa, and Madero; not the most likely of ideological bedfellows. As I believe I said about The Confidential Agent, in which the middle-class Catholic Greene shows sympathy for the Spanish Republicans at a time when others of his background would not have: I appreciate his open-mindedness on the political topics of his day, where he could have been much more one-sided. His novels on Catholicism probably speak more to Catholics, but they are as readable and as interesting as his "entertainments" so far.