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Unsaintly Saintliness
Steven Faulkner on Graham Greene's Whisky Priest
Two or three decades ago I read Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory. I didn't like it. Greene's protagonist, the "whisky priest," is so self-critical, so completely self-incriminating, that there seemed no space left for the intervention of grace in his life, no vestige of power or glory. His mind and soul are crowded with self-loathing; he is an alcoholic, and he has conceived a child by a village woman. He realizes that he loves the child who is the fruit of his mortal sin, and this love of the bastard child seems to him evidence of his inability to repent honestly of his sin; how can you repent when you go on loving the fruit of your sin? Though the priest ends up being shot for his faith, Greene does everything possible to convince us that he is not a holy martyr, not a saint, just a plump-faced, ragged little man who cannot rise to any level of heroism.
But having just reread the novel, I've changed my mind.
The Bold & the Pitiful
Greene traveled through Mexico in 1938, investigating the state of the Catholic Church there twenty years after passage of the 1917 revolutionary constitution of Mexico, which contained a number of anti-Catholic provisions that virtually outlawed the church. Riding by train, motorized barge, small airplane, and even by mule on a difficult stretch through the mountains, Greene witnessed firsthand the attempted destruction of Catholicism across Mexico. The worst repression he encountered was in the southern state of Tabasco, where the governor, Tomas Garrido Canabal, had either destroyed the churches or turned them into warehouses, and had diligently hunted down the priests.
Perhaps the most famous priest to be captured and sent to Mexico City for execution was Miguel Pro in 1927. Plutarco Elia Calles, the de facto leader of Mexico at the time, was rigorously enforcing the anti-Catholic and anti-clerical provisions of the constitution, which had precipitated what was called the Cristeros War of 1926 to 1934, when thousands of Catholics took up arms against the state. Calles made sure that Miguel Pro's execution was photographed and that the photos were printed in the newspapers to intimidate Catholics. The photographs showed the handsome, young Father Pro praying on his knees, then standing up and facing the firing squad without a blindfold and with his arms extended in the shape of a cross, a crucifix in one hand and a rosary in the other. After loudly declaring that he forgave his killers, he then shouted the Cristero battle cry: "Viva Cristo Rey!"—"Long live Christ the King!"—as the shots rang out.
Instead of striking fear into the hearts of believers, the photos of the execution inspired Catholics across the country. Many cut out the newspaper pictures of their martyred priest and treasured them, even though the laws forbade owning Catholic books, pictures, and symbols. In 1988 Pope John Paul II beatified Miguel Pro.
Unlike the actual martyred priest, whose photos Greene saw while traveling through Mexico, the sad, cowardly, pathetic little priest in The Power and the Glory, when finally captured,can barely make his trembling legs walk across the prison yard. He tries unsuccessfully to say or cry out something as the guns fire, but his motions are jerky, and all that comes out of his dry mouth is a raspy mutter that sounds something like "Excuse . . ."
Expecting the End
Yet, having reread the novel, I now see that this whisky priest is clearly a good man, a priest of high moral courage, and perhaps a saint, as Greene surely intended.
Partway through the novel, the priest, who must always dress in disguise and has been on the run from the atheistic government for several years, is at last arrested and thrown into jail, not for being a priest (they don't suspect him of this), but for carrying a bottle of brandy, which the puritanical authorities have banned.
Steven Faulkner teaches creative writing at Longwood University in southern Virginia. He is the author of Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2007) and Bitterroot: Echoes of Beauty and Loss (2016). Both books are memoirs of father-son journeys that followed the paths of missionary priests: Marquette (in Waterwalk) and De Smet (in Bitterroot).
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