The Power and the Glory

Summary

The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures. He has fathered a child, drinks compulsively, fears pain and death, and often seems less courageous than trapped by duty. Pursued by a severe lieutenant who believes the Church perpetuates poverty and superstition, the priest moves through villages, plantations, prisons and wilderness, alternately helped, betrayed and misunderstood. Greene refuses simple martyrdom. The priest knows he is sinful, cowardly and spiritually shabby; yet he continues to hear confessions, say Mass when possible and respond to calls for sacraments. A mestizo repeatedly attaches himself to the priest and eventually helps lure him back across the border to attend a dying American criminal. The priest has a chance to escape into relative safety, but the demand of priestly office pulls him toward capture. Meanwhile the lieutenant takes hostages and executes villagers in order to force betrayal, convinced that violence can serve a rational future without clerical illusion. The novel's force lies in the clash between institutional religion's corruption and grace's scandalous persistence through an unworthy vessel. Greene makes holiness inseparable from bodily weakness: thirst, fever, toothache, hunger, alcohol craving, exhaustion, fear of execution and the foul intimacy of prison. Secondary figures such as Mr. Tench, Coral Fellows and Padre Jose widen the picture of exile, compromise and spiritual fatigue. The priest's final night does not transform him into a serene saint; he remains frightened and regretful. But his return to danger suggests that vocation may survive the collapse of personal virtue. The novel ends with another priest arriving, implying that repression cannot fully extinguish the sacramental imagination.

Plot or Argument

• A hunted priest

  The whisky priest moves through a state where the Church is persecuted. He misses opportunities to escape because parishioners still need sacraments.

• The lieutenant's campaign

  The lieutenant pursues the priest as a symbol of the old order, using surveillance, hostage-taking and execution to force villagers into cooperation.

• Sin and sacrament

  The priest confronts his alcoholism, fear and sexual sin, including the daughter he has fathered, while continuing to perform priestly duties.

• Prison and recognition

  In a crowded prison, the priest is hidden among the poor and guilty. The scene tests whether religious identity is legal category, inward vocation or social relation.

• Temporary escape

  The priest crosses into a safer region and briefly tastes relief, but the demand to attend a dying man draws him back.

• Betrayal and execution

  The mestizo's trap brings the priest to the American criminal and then to arrest. The priest dies afraid and imperfect, while the lieutenant's victory remains spiritually incomplete.

• The return of priesthood

  A new priest appears at the end, suggesting continuity beyond individual failure and state violence.

Characters

• The whisky priest, protagonist

  A fugitive Catholic priest, alcoholic and frightened, who nevertheless continues to serve the faithful.

• The lieutenant, antagonist

  An austere revolutionary officer committed to destroying the Church for what he sees as the good of the poor.

• The mestizo, betrayer

  A sickly, opportunistic man who follows and ultimately betrays the priest for reward.

• Coral Fellows, young helper

  A self-possessed girl from a banana plantation who briefly shelters the priest.

• Mr. Tench, dentist

  An English dentist in Mexico, lonely and spiritually numb, whose perspective frames parts of the story.

• Brigitta, the priest's daughter

  The priest's illegitimate child, confronting him with the human consequence of his sin and love.

• Padre Jose, married former priest

  A priest who has submitted to the state and married, embodying survival purchased by spiritual humiliation.

Lessons

• Grace does not require respectability

  Greene separates sanctity from moral tidiness. The priest's failures are real, but the novel insists that grace may operate through a frightened, alcoholic and sinful man.

  • Does the priest become a martyr?
  • How does Greene keep failure from becoming an excuse?
  • Why is respectability spiritually dangerous in the novel?

• Political purity can become cruelty

  The lieutenant's hatred of clerical coercion comes from a recognizable moral anger. Yet his certainty permits hostage-taking and execution, showing how humane ideals can turn inhuman when pity is excluded.

  • What does the lieutenant understand correctly about the Church?
  • Where does his justice become injustice?

• Vocation may outlast self-image

  The priest often acts because he cannot cease being a priest, not because he feels heroic. The novel teaches that duty can persist when courage, self-respect and certainty collapse.

  • Is the priest free when he returns to danger?
  • What is the difference between vocation and compulsion?

• Bodies are where theology becomes real

  Hunger, drink, fever, fear and execution prevent faith from becoming abstract. Greene's Catholicism is incarnational: the soul is tested through weak flesh.

  • How does alcohol shape the priest's spirituality?
  • Why does Greene emphasize dirt, heat and bodily discomfort?

Context

The novel draws on the anticlerical persecution of the Catholic Church in post-revolutionary Mexico, especially in Tabasco under Tomas Garrido Canabal. It reflects Greene's Catholic imagination and his interest in political ideologies that promise liberation while using coercion.

Composition

Greene traveled in Mexico in 1938 and wrote the nonfiction book The Lawless Roads before transforming his material into fiction. The Power and the Glory was published in 1940, as Europe entered wartime crisis.

Reception

The novel became one of Greene's most admired works, though it also drew Catholic controversy; the Vatican later objected to aspects of his religious fiction. It remains central to discussions of modern Catholic literature and the antiheroic saint.

Comparisons

• the-quiet-american

  Both Greene novels place flawed men in political danger, but The Power and the Glory is structured by sacrament while The Quiet American is structured by imperial intervention and betrayal.

• heart-of-darkness

  Both move through oppressive heat, imperial or political violence and moral darkness, though Greene's frame is Catholic grace rather than metaphysical horror.

• the-death-of-ivan-ilyich

  Tolstoy and Greene both strip respectable life down before death, forcing a confrontation between social identity and spiritual truth.

• the-bible

  The novel repeatedly echoes Gospel reversals in which the sinner, criminal or outcast may be nearer grace than the righteous.

• a-burnt-out-case

  Greene again studies exhausted faith, bodily suffering and the ambiguity of charity in a colonial setting.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening chapter at the port, where the priest, waiting with Mr. Tench for the boat that would carry him to safety, is called away to a sick woman and misses it. The same pattern of escape refused for the sake of a sacrament recurs at the end.
• The lieutenant's chapters. Notice his bare room, his tenderness toward children, his hatred of the Church for what he believes it did to the poor, and his decision to take hostages from the villages.
• The episode in the capital where the priest spends his money on contraband wine for Mass, only to watch the governor's cousin and the jefe drink it all.
• The night in the crowded prison cell, where the priest, unrecognized, hears the sounds of the prisoners around him and feels a love for them he has never felt for the respectable faithful.
• The frame story of the boy Luis, whose mother reads aloud the pious life of a martyr named Juan. Compare Juan's tidy martyrdom with the priest's frightened death, and watch what Luis does in the final scene.

Key terms and names

The whisky priest

The unnamed hero, the last priest still active in the state, so called for his drinking. He has fathered a child, fears pain, and doubts his own worth, yet he keeps hearing confessions and saying Mass at the risk of his life.

The lieutenant

The police officer who hunts the priest, an austere and incorruptible believer in a world without God. He wants to give the children of the state a happier life and is willing to shoot hostages to get it.

The mestizo

The yellow-fanged, feverish man who attaches himself to the priest, recognizes him, and plans to sell him for the reward. The priest knows from the start that he is a Judas and travels with him anyway.

Padre José

A priest who obeyed the law requiring priests to marry and now lives a humiliated life under his wife's command, mocked by the town's children. Near the end he is too afraid to hear the condemned priest's confession.

Brigitta

The priest's young daughter by Maria, a village woman. When he sees in her an already knowing, hardened child, he feels a love and fear for her soul that he cannot feel as a general duty for all souls.

Coral Fellows

The serious young daughter of an English banana planter, who hides the priest from the police and asks him questions about faith. Her quiet courage contrasts with the timid adults around her.

The gringo

An American bank robber and murderer, wanted on the same posters as the priest. His dying wish is the bait the mestizo uses to draw the priest back across the border to arrest.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does the priest miss the boat in the opening chapter, and what does Mr. Tench notice about him?
2. Comprehension How does the priest end up in prison in the capital, and why do the police fail to realize who he is?
3. Comprehension What happens when the priest finally reaches the safety of the Lehrs' house across the border, and why does he leave it?
4. Interpretation The priest goes to the dying gringo knowing the mestizo has set a trap. Why does he go, and does it make his death a martyrdom?
5. Interpretation In prison a pious woman is outraged by the sinners around her, while the priest feels closer to the criminals than to her. What does Greene suggest about holiness and respectability?
6. Interpretation The lieutenant and the priest talk through the night before the execution. In what ways are they alike, and why does the lieutenant go to fetch Padre José for him?
7. Interpretation Why does Greene end the novel with the boy Luis opening the door to a new priest rather than with the execution itself?
8. Big Question Can a man who is weak, sinful, and afraid still be a faithful servant of God, and does the grace he carries depend on his own goodness?

Faith Connections

• 2 Corinthians 4:7 (Scripture)

  Paul says the treasure of the gospel is held in earthen vessels, so that the excellency of the power may be of God. The whisky priest is the most cracked of vessels, yet through him the sacraments still reach the villages, which is the novel's central paradox.

• Luke 18:9-14 (Scripture)

  Jesus tells of the Pharisee who thanks God he is not like other men and the tax collector who can only ask for mercy. The pious woman in the prison cell and the priest who knows he deserves nothing play out the parable among thieves and murderers.

• Matthew 6:13 (Scripture)

  The novel's title comes from the closing doxology of the Lord's Prayer in the King James Version, which ascribes the kingdom, the power, and the glory to God. Greene sets that claim against the lieutenant's state, which holds all earthly power and still cannot extinguish the priesthood.

• Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists (Church Fathers)

  Against the Donatists, Augustine argued that the sacraments are Christ's and do not lose their power when the minister is unworthy. The villagers who walk miles to make their confession to a drunken priest are acting on that teaching, and Greene's whole plot depends on it.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The lieutenant reasons that the Church has kept the poor in misery and that destroying its last priest will free them for a better life. But the priest, for all his sins, is the only one who still brings the people what they most hunger for: absolution, the Mass, and assurance that their suffering matters to God. The value of what he carries does not depend on his own worthiness, and his weakness makes his perseverance all the more costly. Therefore grace survives where virtue fails, and a state that holds all power cannot stamp it out.

Rhetorical device: foil. Greene pairs the lieutenant and the priest throughout: the one chaste, disciplined, and without faith, the other drunken, weak, and believing. Their long conversation after the arrest shows that each loves the poor in his own way, and the contrast makes the reader ask which man actually serves them.

Debate: Resolved: The whisky priest is a saint.

Writing Prompts

Essay: The priest turns away from safety twice, at the boat in the opening chapter and at the Lehrs' house across the border near the end. Argue what draws him back each time, and whether these choices show growth in his character or the same vocation working through an unchanged man.

Comparison with Letters and Papers from Prison: Greene's fictional priest and Dietrich Bonhoeffer both faced death at the hands of a state hostile to the Church, and both wrote or thought in prison about weakness, guilt, and faithfulness. Compare the whisky priest's last night with Bonhoeffer's reflections in his prison letters, and argue what each suggests about how a Christian should face a regime that demands betrayal.

Medical Lens

The whisky priest's alcoholism is central, not decorative: drink marks shame, compulsion, bodily need and social identity. The novel is also full of heat, tooth decay, fever, hunger, prison crowding, execution anxiety and last rites. Mr. Tench's dentistry and the priest's sacramental care create a useful contrast between bodily and spiritual professions, while the lieutenant's hostage policy raises medical-ethical questions about bodies used instrumentally by the state.

• Opening section with Mr. Tench

  The dentist's decayed professional life and the priest's search for brandy establish bodily and spiritual malaise together.

  Physicians DoctorsAlcoholPain
• Village and flight chapters

  The priest's craving for alcohol recurs alongside fear, fatigue, hunger and the need to perform sacraments.

  AlcoholAddictionStarvation Nutrition
• Prison sequence

  Crowded confinement, bodily stink, fear and legal violence place sin and suffering in an institutional space.

  Asylum InstitutionTrauma Shell ShockPublic Health Sanitation
• Final return to the dying American

  The call to attend a dying man forces the priest back into danger and frames sacramental care as a duty to the body at death.

  Death DyingNursing CaregivingMedical Ethics

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the whisky priest's final night as a sequence of bodily sensations rather than theological declarations.

• Essay

  Analyze alcoholism in the novel as sin, illness, social label and sacramental parody.

• Dialogue

  Stage a debate between the lieutenant and a public-health doctor about whether coercion can ever heal a society.

Further Reading

• The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene

• The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

• Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, Richard Greene

• The Life of Graham Greene, Norman Sherry