Graham Greene pieced together The Power and the Glory from his own personal memoirs in 1940 after a three-year trip to Mexico.  Drawing from his own observations of a small town torn between the anti-religious laws of the secular government and the people’s religious beliefs, Greene created the story of a Catholic priest being pursued by the police to illustrate the conflicting relationship between the church and state (Greene 2-4).  Greene used his experiences in Mexico to create an extended allegory that illustrates the conflict between the two world views and, in turn, reveals his own values and philosophy.

    Drawing from his experience in Mexico, Greene developed a "whiskey priest," a character introduced to Greene by a friend in Mexico in a story of a drunken priest that christened a child by the wrong name, to embody the religious world view.  The priest, who remains nameless throughout the novel to emphasize his allegorical role, is less an individual than a symbol of the "Church [and] of the cumulative wisdom of the past, in short, of Western Humanism" (DeVitis 89).  The priest, however, is seen as a traitor to the state and to his religion.  The last Catholic priest in a secular Mexican state, the priest’s photograph is hung next to that of a notorious American gangster on the wall of the police office.  The priest’s tendency towards gin, cowardliness, and his moral weakness make him a traitor to his faith and religious order.   On the allegorical level of the novel, the priest’s flight from the police is seen as a "flight from God" and away from becoming a saint (DeVitis 90).  Refusing to accept his destiny of being captured by the police and becoming a martyr for his faith, partially out of fear of pain and his own refusal to abandon the Catholic people of the state, his escape becomes a journey of self-recognition.  Only after a "half-caste," a "Judas figure of evil and treachery," betrays him is the priest forced to recognize his destiny of becoming a martyr (Allott 174).   The half-caste leads him to the lieutenant of the police and "it is at this moment that the theme of flight and pursuit is reversed" and the lieutenant becomes pursued by the priest and the world view that he embodies (DeVitis 90).  Arrested and thrown in a crowded prison surrounded by "the sinners and the rats and the rascals," the priest finally realizes the "the power and the glory" of God and sees the beauty of God reflected in the other prisoners:

At the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery- that we were made in God’s image- God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac and the judge.  Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attributes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex.  He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out: and God’s image shook now…with the yellow teeth [of the half-caste], and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion [of the priest’s mortal sin] (Greene 254).

By using the priest as a symbol of the Church, Greene successfully asserts the "vitality of the Roman Catholic Church" and "explains the value of its beliefs" (DeVitis 89).  Through the actions and thoughts of the priest the reader is able to detect the author’s sympathetic tone towards the Church in the conflict between religion and state.

    To represent the opposing world view, Greene used the lieutenant in pursuit of the priest to embody the secular order.  Within the framework of the allegory the "poles represented by the whiskey priest and the lieutenant are arranged in a satiric fashion" (DeVitis 91).  Whereas the priest is a cowardly drunkard and plagued by his own mortal sin the lieutenant is strong, brave, temperate, celibate and has self-respect..   The lieutenant, who also remains nameless throughout the novel, is described as "a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again" (Greene 25). As the epitome of the secular order, the lieutenant promises "food, clothing, and security" contrary to the priest’s ideology of "misery, poverty, and superstition" (DeVitis 92).  Although Greene developed the role of the lieutenant as superior to the priest, the author’s position is revealed in the conflict between the two world views embodied by the priest and the lieutenant.  After completing his mission and arranging for the priest’s execution the priest falls asleep at his desk "with utter weariness. [Unable to] remember afterwards anything of his dreams except laughter, laughter all the time, and a long passage in which he could find no door" (Greene 280).  Greene uses the dream to suggest that the lieutenant is the prisoner and the laughter is the priest’s "celebrating the release of a captive human soul from punishment and its entrance into paradise" (Hynes 67).  Only after the priest’s execution is the lieutenant forced to realize his own emptiness and does Greene reveal his religious compassion.

    Although often criticized for being "chiefly Roman Catholic," The Power and the Glory masterfully illustrates the intense conflict between the secular and religious world views (Hynes 70).  By developing complex allegorical characters, Graham Greene achieves an almost myth-like quality.
 
 

    Bibliography

Allot, Kenneth and Miriam Farris, The Art of Graham Greene. New York:  Russell & Russell, 1951.

DeVitis, A. A., Graham Greene.  New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964.

Greene, Graham, The Power and the Glory.  New York: The Viking Press, 1940.

Hynes, Samuel ed.,  Graham Greene: A Collection of Critical Essays.   Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.