Power and Glory

Graham Greene is best known for his novel Our Man in Havana. The dark comedy portrays a hapless British spy living in Havana named James Wormold who is given the task of informing the British government of any Soviet military activity in Cuba. Wormold has nothing to report, so he fabricates files back to the home office.

He claims there is a secret military installation in the snow-capped mountains of Cuba. As proof of the existence of a scary military apparatus on the island, he sends his superiors charcoal sketches of the installation, which are actually drawings of vacuum cleaner parts scaled to a large size and made to appear as a futuristic military base.

Screenshot from the movie "Our Man in Havana".

Drawing of unidentifiable pieces of gigantic machinery hidden deep in Cuban mountains.

Greene wrote the book during the last year of the Cuban Revolution in 1958. When the book was published the following year, Fidel Castro had taken over the country and was not happy that Greene failed to portray exiled president Fulgencio Batista in a negative light.

Our Man in Havana was not the first novel Graham Greene wrote about events in Latin America. Nearly two decades earlier, he published a dramatic novel about the treatment of Catholic priests during the Mexican Revolution.

The title of this earlier book based in Mexico was The Power and the Glory, which is an allusion to the doxology often recited at the end of the Lord's Prayer: For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.

Graham converted to Catholicism at age twenty-two, in order to marry the girl he loved. He was never a fervent believer in God, but he was concerned about social conditions in Mexico and what he considered, "The fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth."

He was paid to travel through southern Mexico by Viking publishers in 1938. They sponsored him to write a travelogue for them called The Lawless Roads. His observations for that travelogue in Mexico became the content of The Power and the Glory. The places, events, and characters in the novel resemble people he describes in his more relaxed and critical non-fiction book.

The Mexican Revolution was a brutal civil war fought from 1910 to 1920. We hear of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata in history class, but we hear very little about how the socialist revolutionaries treated priests and the Catholic church around Mexico.

The book by Greene focuses on the Mexican state of Tabasco, which was governed by the militant socialist and anti-clerical Tomás Garrido Canabal. Canabal hated the Catholic church that taught nonsense to uneducated peasants and their priests who enriched themselves at the expense of people they were supposed to protect. He sought to establish a socialist utopia by giving property to the Maya people who had been dispossessed of their land upon the arrival of the Spanish four-hundred years earlier.

The president of Mexico, Plutarco Elias Calles, gave local governors the authority to confiscate all church property and force priests to marry women. Canabal executed or exiled all priests who refused to marry. One of those priests is the subject of The Power and the Glory. The priest in the novel by Graham Greene was never given a name. His character is based on the executed Jesuit priest Miguel Pro Juárez, but in the story we know him only as the whiskey priest, because of his addiction to alcohol and lack of discipline with a woman of his village.

We meet the whiskey priest early in the novel on his way to the Mexican port city of Veracruz, where he hopes to join other priests on their way to exile to the United States or Europe. He is not wearing religious clothing because he is on the run from a military lieutenant who is hunting him down.

The priest chooses not to take a boat that will lead him to freedom and the protection of Veracruz, because an indigenous child tells him that someone needs his priestly services in the rainforests in the opposite direction of the coast.

As he leaves the town of Yajalón on his way to the jungle village of Las Casas, he enters the forest trails wondering who he can trust. He has been accustomed to the deference and adoration of people all his life. It is difficult to know if people respected him as a person or only as a priest. His position of power over their lives, and even eternal lives, forced people to act perhaps more friendly toward him than they actually felt.

Now that it was illegal to be a priest, would people continue to respect him, or would they turn him over to the agents of the government seeking to kill him? To encourage the help of villagers in their quest to capture him, the government soldiers would kill a local hostage if they wouldn't give information leading to the capture of the wanted priest.

The whiskey priest has to ask himself if it's moral to watch innocent lives being taken for his sake. Can a man watch someone else die on his behalf, and not end the killing by turning himself in? Villagers inevitably came to fear his presence because of what that may mean for them and their loved ones. Throughout his journey, he becomes more isolated and morally compromised until he questions the point of continuing his life.

He is driven forward by his sacred duty to present the host on the altar to penitents. He takes very seriously the mystical conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ during the eucharist. The lieutenant hunting down the priest knows this motivates the priest, so he sets a trap with a person willing to betray him. The question for the reader is whether or not the priest falls into the trap, and what other desires may motivate him to flee or face certain death.

Sources:

Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory. The Viking Press, 1940.

Kelley, Francis C. The Book of Red and Yellow: Being a story of Blood and a Yellow Streak. The Henry O. Shepard Company, 1915.

Quirk, Robert E. The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church: 1910-1929. Indiana University Press, 1973.

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