The Power and the Glory

The Priest

He has no name. He is the last functioning priest in his Mexican state, where the revolutionary government has outlawed religion and hunted down the clergy. The other priests have fled or renounced their vows or been shot. He remains, moving from village to village, saying Mass in secret, hearing confessions, baptising children.

He is also a drunk. He has a daughter, Brigitta, by a village woman — a product of a night when the loneliness became too great. He knows he is in a state of mortal sin. He knows he is a coward. He keeps going anyway, because the villages still need the sacraments and there is no one else to give them.

The Lieutenant

The police lieutenant who hunts him is not a villain. He is an idealist — a man who hates the Church because the Church kept the poor poor, and who wants the revolution to build schools and clinics and a world without supernatural consolation. He is, in his way, as dedicated as the priest. Their final encounter is one of the great scenes in modern fiction.

Greene wrote The Power and the Glory after visiting Mexico in 1938 and witnessing the anti-clerical persecutions. The Catholic Church initially condemned the novel; it was later praised by Pope Paul VI. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1941.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Power and the Glory apart: The whisky priest is one of 20th-century fiction’s most fully realised characters — a coward, a drunk, and a genuine vessel of grace; The cat-and-mouse structure between priest and lieutenant is formally perfect — the pursuit is both thriller and theological argument; and Greene renders the Mexican landscape — heat, poverty, muddy rivers — with extraordinary physical precision. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Power and the Glory give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Grace is not conditional on the worthiness of its instrument — the whisky priest administers real sacraments despite his real failures. The lieutenant’s atheism is as sincere as the priest’s faith — Greene respects both and does not resolve the argument. Cowardice and sanctity are not opposites — the priest’s cowardice is part of his humanity, and his humanity is part of his holiness. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Why It Endures

The Power and the Glory belongs to the literary canon for reasons that become clear on reading. Graham Greene’s command of the form was exceptional for their era and remains impressive today. The social observation is precise, the characterisation is economical, and the underlying moral intelligence is never heavy-handed. These are the properties that separate enduring literature from period curiosity.

Limitations

The Catholic theological framework is so central that readers outside that tradition may find the priest’s self-assessment opaque. The pace is deliberately slow in sections — this is not a thriller in the conventional sense. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of Catholic literary fiction and serious religious novels, and anyone interested in Greene’s theological imagination at its most concentrated.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Greene’s greatest novel; the whisky priest belongs among the 20th century’s most unforgettable characters.

A Masterpiece of Moral Struggle

The Power and the Glory endures as one of Graham Greene’s finest achievements because it locates genuine spiritual drama in the most unlikely of vessels. The fugitive “whisky priest,” weak, sinful, and full of self-doubt, becomes through his suffering a paradoxical figure of grace, and Greene uses his flight to explore the deepest questions of faith, duty, and redemption. Set against a vividly rendered landscape of persecution, the novel refuses easy piety, finding holiness in failure and meaning in martyrdom that the priest himself can barely comprehend. It is this unflinching, compassionate engagement with the mystery of faith that has made the book a touchstone of twentieth-century Catholic literature and a profound novel for readers of any belief.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Graham Greene
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene — Full Review
• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene — Full Review

Publication and the Whisky Priest

The Power and the Glory was published in 1940 as Greene’s sixth novel and the second of his “Catholic novels,” following Brighton Rock. The book was set in the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, during a period when the anti-clerical government of Governor Tomás Garrido Canabal had ordered the execution of all priests who refused to marry or publicly renounce their faith. Greene had visited Mexico in 1938 and documented the conditions in his travel book The Lawless Roads (1939); the novel uses the same material with the specificity of direct observation.

Critical and Ecclesiastical Reception

The Power and the Glory won the Hawthornden Prize in 1941 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize retrospectively in 1970 when the prize established a selection of notable earlier novels. In 1953, the Holy Office — the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog — condemned the novel as paradoxical and liable to mislead, specifically because its protagonist, the whisky priest, is a morally degraded man whose priesthood is nonetheless presented as genuine. Greene met with Cardinal Heenan and a representative of the Holy Office; the condemnation was not lifted, but it was not formally promulgated. The novel remains the most theologically challenging of Greene’s Catholic novels precisely because it refuses to make its priest good.

Greene’s Mexican Journey

Greene travelled to Mexico in 1938, funded partly by his publisher, to report on the persecution of the Catholic Church under the Calles government’s anti-clerical laws, which had closed churches, expelled foreign clergy, and outlawed public religious practice in some states. The Power and the Glory drew directly on the experience of a priest he met in Tabasco state who continued to practise in secret. Greene described the “whiskey priest” as his most complex theological portrait.