Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940) is widely regarded as the finest Catholic novel written in English in the twentieth century, and the work that established Greene's reputation as a serious rather than merely popular novelist. Set in the Mexican state of Tabasco during the anti-clerical persecutions of the 1930s - when the socialist government of Tomás Garrido Canabal outlawed the priesthood, burned churches, and executed clergy - the novel confronts an uncomfortable theological question: what happens to the grace of the sacraments when the vessel administering them is morally worthless?
The protagonist, known throughout only as 'the whisky priest,' is an alcoholic who has fathered a child with a woman in a village he visited on his circuit. He is cowardly, self-doubting, and tormented by the knowledge of his own inadequacy. He could escape across the border into safety but repeatedly delays - drawn back by the demands of the dying, the imprisoned, the spiritually bereft who have no other priest. The novel traces his final weeks of flight from a 'mestizo' - a Judas figure - who eventually betrays him, and his ultimate capture and execution by the lieutenant who has pursued him throughout.
The theological argument of the novel is drawn primarily from two Pauline texts. The first is 2 Corinthians 4:7 - 'We have this treasure in jars of clay' - which is athe novel's governing image: divine grace, the treasure of the sacraments, does not depend on the moral quality of the clay vessel that contains it. The whisky priest baptizes, hears confessions, celebrates Mass, and administers the last rites, and these acts are valid not because he is worthy but because he has been ordained. This is the Catholic doctrine of ex opere operato - the sacrament works by the power of the act itself, not by the virtue of the minister - and Greene deploys it not as a technical theological point but as a mystery that implicates both the priest and God in something neither can control.
The second Pauline text is 2 Corinthians 12:9 - 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness' - which the priest's whole existence embodies. His weakness is not an obstacle to God's purpose but in some strange way its instrument. He is more useful to the people precisely because he is like them - broken, sinful, afraid - than he would be if he were a plaster saint. The novel's logic insists that this is not an excuse for sin but a theology of the unlikely carrier of grace.
The priest's capture and execution follow the structure of Christ's Passion with deliberate and ironic precision. The mestizo who betrays him parallels Judas; the lieutenant who pursues him is a man of genuine moral integrity who has substituted political ideology for religion. Greene's most challenging move is to make the lieutenant - the atheist who executes the priest - a man of sincere conviction and even ascetic discipline, while the priest is a sinner who doubts his own salvation. This inversion of expected moral categories is the novel's most disturbing theological maneuver.
Luke 22:42 - 'Not my will, but yours be done' - echoes in the priest's final night before his execution, which Greene handles with tremendous restraint. The priest does not achieve heroic resignation; he is afraid, and he weeps. What he is denied is the comfort of feeling like a martyr. This is, Greene implies, perhaps the truest martyrdom.
The novel was initially condemned by the Vatican's Holy Office in 1953 as likely to 'paradoxically exalt the weak and cowardly character of the unworthy priest.' Greene met with Pope Paul VI to discuss it in 1965 and was apparently told, privately, that the condemnation had been a mistake. The Power and the Glory has since become a staple of seminary curricula and university courses in religion and literature, and Greene received the Jerusalem Prize in 1981 partly in recognition of the humane theology embedded in his fiction.
The whisky priest's journey also maps onto the Pauline theology of weakness. The repeated phrase in 2 Corinthians - 'when I am weak, then I am strong' (12:10) - is the paradox that Greene builds the entire novel around. The priest's power, such as it is, comes not from his virtue or his orthodoxy but from his willingness to continue ministering despite his failures. He baptizes, hears confessions, and celebrates Mass in hiding, not because he has overcome his weakness but because he has accepted that the sacraments do not depend on his worthiness. This is a deeply Catholic understanding of the priesthood, and Greene renders it with theological precision.
The Power and the Glory has been read as a Cold War allegory - the atheist state versus the Church - and as a simple story of martyrdom. But its deepest concern is with the mystery of vocation: why God calls flawed instruments, and what it costs them to respond. The final image, of a new priest arriving in the village where the whisky priest was shot, suggests not triumphalism but continuation - the Church grinding on, carrying its mixed freight of holiness and failure, sustained by something other than the virtue of its ministers.