One of my favorite books is The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.
Set in the 1930s when Mexico was still persecuting the Catholic Church (a persecution which the government of the United States consented to), the novel follows the life of a nameless “whiskey priest” who, despite being a drunk and a fornicator with an illegitimate daughter, continues to illegally minister to the people while other more reputable priests have abandoned their ministry out of fear of the punishment by the government.
The whiskey priest is lured to his doom by his sense of duty, as a request for a deathbed confession is communicated to him by a lying Judas-like figure. Despite his suspicions, the whiskey priest goes and is arrested. Sentenced to die, and denied confession by one of those priests who had abandoned ministry, we see into the whiskey priest’s thoughts for a final time in what I consider the most moving paragraph in all of literature:
What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived. His parents were dead—soon he wouldn’t even be a memory—perhaps after all he was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.
The novel ends with another fugitive priest arriving, and a young boy who had previously been a skeptic greeting him enthusiastically, having been inspired by the martyrdom of the whiskey priest.
Years ago, this novel helped convince me that I could enter seminary despite the heavy realization of my own sinfulness. In 2020, those of us who were trying to get sacraments to people despite being forbidden by tyrants certainly could identify with the sense of duty demonstrated by the whiskey priest. I know of one priest who had to remove his cassock, put on jeans, and pretend to be a grandson in order to bring the sacraments to a woman in the nursing home.
The irony in all of this, however, is that some powerful men in the Church wanted the novel placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Thankfully this would not occur, and Greene’s account of the conflict includes a useful comparison to totalitarianism:
The Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the Holy Office condemning my novel because it was “paradoxical” and “dealt with extraordinary circumstances.” The price of liberty, even within a Church, is eternal vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states…would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in the hands of my publishers. There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for unimportant issues.
I’d like to suggest that understanding the use (and abuse) of the religious impulse to limit what type of content an adherent consumes can help us to understand the wave of censorship which has taken hold in the West, especially with respect to what began in 2020.
Hellbound and Down 