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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Village and flight chapters

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

• Prison sequence

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

• 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.