The novel is set in Mexico, after the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The government at that time was extremely anti-clerical. The church was under persecution. All the priests were either forced to flee or renounce their vocation and get married or else they would be arrested and shot. The novel’s reluctant hero is the unnamed whisky priest who finds himself the only one who stayed despite the persecution and the danger. The plot follows his travails as he eludes the hand of the law.
It seems that the whisky priest is in every respect a hero and a martyr. But in him we find no pious, eyes-perpetually-raised-to-heaven kind of saintliness. He is a broken man with a bad drinking habit. One vulnerable night, he fathers a child in one of the villages he visits. And despite being able to elude captivity for a long time, he is unashamedly a coward. At one point he is asked the reason why he stayed behind instead of running away to safety: "Once," the priest said, "I asked myself that. The fact is, a man isn’t presented suddenly with two courses to follow: one good and one bad. He gets caught up... It would have been much better if I had gone too. Because pride was at work all the time. Not love of God. Just pride because I stayed."
The priest knew only too well how fallen he had become. But his confessions of fear and frailty have a certain purity to them, much like the humility of Peter who asks the Lord to stay away from him for he is "a sinful man" or like the prayer of the publican in the temple. Yet it is precisely this that earns for our whisky priest a surer kind of salvation, not the kind hankered for by the pious woman that he meets in prison who was incarcerated for owning religious books. Her pharisaic piety is all-too common. She has nothing but contempt for "sinners" and the "unclean, ugly ones." This view is so common it’s scary, because we find this woman in all of us regardless of religion or demographics.
This scene where the priest is confronted by the woman in the prison cell is especially moving. In it, not only does Graham Greene confront us with the emptiness of misguided piety, he brings to a head the priest’s paradoxical descent into despair and simultaneous transcendence. The priest is arrested for being caught possessing liquor. It is nighttime, the police do not know that he is a priest, and he is put in a cell with several other criminals. The stench, the suspense, the utter hopelessness is almost unbearable. But the priest finds a certain deliverance in these depths. "Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals... He had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove... Then in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt..." Only when he comes to grips with his utter sinfulness does he finally learn compassion.
It is said that The Power and the Glory is Graham Greene’s technically most superior work, his masterpiece. His one great achievement in this novel is the way he gives life to the character of the whisky priest. The priest is unnamed all throughout the book, there is practically nothing known about him aside from his being a priest. He could be anyone. And in many ways he is everyone. He stands for every priest who, despite many failings, remains committed to his call. Like Peter, upon them the Church is founded. He stands for every person who has faced and accepted his or her sinfulness, who has allowed himself or herself to be indicted before God and found mercy, forgiveness and compassion instead. For them the Church was founded.
The state of Catholic priesthood is very much under fire today. So many are disillusioned by the failure of many priests to be worthy examples of piety and perfection. But in the life of a priest, as in the life of all Christians, what will ultimately be measured is not success, not perfection but fidelity and compassion, the only two things the whisky priest has left.
In his introduction to the 1990 edition of the novel, John Updike wrote that Greene’s religious faith "has always included a conviction that, as he put in an essay on Eric Gill in 1941, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be...impossible bedfellows." It is therefore not surprising to read in The Power and the Glory a call to the radical and yet primordial Christian tenets of compassion, fidelity and forgiveness. The book is a good reminder lest we forget that Christ himself said, "I have come to call sinners, not the self-righteous."