The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
Completed June 2002
Graham Greene’s “whiskey
priest” struggles with his calling, with sin and with his life. In so doing,
though, he reminds all of us that life in Christ is complicated. I am reminded
of the parable where Jesus tells of two sons, the one who promises to go out and
work in the vineyard but then doesn’t, and the one who tells his father that he
won’t go, but then does. In the parable, it is simple: the son who loves his
father is the one who says he will not go, but then goes and does his father’s
work. The whiskey priest is a bit like this: in his personal life he cannot do
what he knows to be the right thing. But in his ecclesiastic life, he does the
Father’s work.
The story is pretty
straight-forward: the whiskey priest is on the run from anti-clerical Mexican
authorities who want to kill him (along with many of his brethren already
killed or run out of the country). The whiskey priest wants to run – to flee
the country. And though he manages to keep just ahead of the authorities, he
cannot seem to leave…for at each point he sees freedom, he also sees people who
need to receive confession, go to Mass or be baptized.
The Power and the Glory is really about sin and sacrament,
then. It is about the priest’s sins and his struggles with them just as it is
about the sacraments that sustain him and the people to whom he ministers. Both
sin and sacraments drive him on from village to village in a story which is
thought-provoking and worthwhile.