“The Power and the Glory” is about a spiritual predicament that I cannot fathom. I am not a Catholic. It is set during an important political and historical event that I was not aware of - the persecution of the Christian clergy in Mexico in the 1930s. I read this book only because I am a big fan of Greene’s “entertainments”.

A spiritually wounded priest is on the run from the Mexican police. He escapes on a mule, traveling from village to village. Wherever he goes, the miserable villagers beg him to perform mass and listen to their confessions. Braving great personal danger, the priest acquiesces to the wishes of the villagers in every village where he hides out. His sense of decency prevents him from abandoning the people who look up to him for salvation. The priest is an alcoholic but despite a government-imposed prohibition, he finds wine, beer and brandy wherever he goes. I often got the impression that the alcohol helped the priest go on as much as him performing his duties as a priest. The protagonists in all of Greene's novels that I have read are heavy drinkers and uses alcohol as a crutch to face their misfortunes.

I am not that well-read, so I could not find a proper reference or context that preceded this book. But while reading it, I was often reminded of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Greene’s descriptions of arid and desolate Mexican landscapes might have inspired Leone:

"MR. TENCH went out to look for his ether cylinder: out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few buzzards looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr. Tench's heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly up at them. One of them rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn't find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side."

“The Priest With No Name” (the priest in the book is never named, he is always called “The Priest”) travels from village to village “saving” the pitiable poverty ridden villagers and drinking their alcohol much like how “The Man With No Name” went from village to village killing the bad guys and looking for money. Like “The Man with No Name” the priest is not pious (he has sinned and has a daughter) and is often selfish – in one village the Mexican police arrests an innocent farmer as hostage to smoke out the priest but the priest who is in the vicinity does not reveal himself to be the man whom they are looking for.

Despite, my lack of knowledge about history and religion, I enjoyed many aspects of this book. I could appreciate some of Greene’s profound allegories (this one about a man who urges the priest to give god to him):

“The priest was reminded of an oil-gusher which some prospectors had once struck near Concepcion—it wasn't a good enough field apparently to justify further operations, but there it had stood for forty-eight hours against the sky, a black fountain spouting out of the marshy useless soil and flowing away to waste—fifty thousand gallons an hour. It was like the religious sense in man, cracking suddenly upwards, a black pillar of fumes and impurity, running to waste.”

These lines about the vagaries of nature could actually describe the priest’s inner landscape:

“The beetles had disappeared: the rain had apparently washed them away: it came perpendicularly down, with a sort of measured intensity, as if it were driving nails into a coffin lid.”

Greene’s fatalism is evident in such heart-breaking lines:

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. The hot wet riverport and the vultures lay in the waste-paper basket, and he picked them out. We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.”

Which reader would be able to resist such crystallizing reflections? Wasn't there some event that happened or a book or movie that we discovered in our childhood, that affected us profoundly and shaped the rest of our lives?

"The Power and the Glory" was a book from which I felt a great distance (hence the 3 rating). The writer Manu Joseph said that most readers look for themselves in the books that they read. I could not find myself in this book. But I could appreciate Greene’s extraordinary talent as a writer.

This little gem turned out to be quite a surprise. It is indeed powerful and it is glorious. Greene's writing seems really simple and is easy to read, and yet is so full of meaning. I am still soaking it all in.

As the lead character, the 'whiskey-priest', moves from one place to another, Greene takes us along on a journey taut with suspense and tension. However, it is really his moral journey which is the most captivating. We not only witness the priest's struggle to escape, we also get to look into his tormented soul and his ambivalence. He is constantly torn between following what his religious faith has taught him while his worldly sense seems to make more practical sense. He feels guilty for his sins, but he loves the fruit of his sin. He almost wishes that he be caught so that he could be rid of the fear and the misery. But doesn't his faith teach him that it is his duty to save his soul? He has sinned and is immoral, but he is also full of compassion and love for fellow human beings.
A question that haunts the priest and the reader throughout is whether he will find redemption and if his soul will achieve salvation? Or do immoralities and sins always overshadow a man's goodness? Greene makes it so easy for one to understand his characters. The priest, with his virtues and his flaws, feels like a very real person. It is not at all difficult to imagine such a person walking some part of this earth in flesh.

While we read the thoughts and the convictions of the priest, the lieutenant serves as the opposing voice. Both have some ideals which I do not completely agree with, but I also don't consider either of them to be totally wrong. I also liked that the priest and the lieutenant, though rivals, are able to see the good in each other and have mutual respect. Through these two characters, Greene brings forth the impermanence of beliefs through which one defines what is "right". Life can always take such turns that one's firmly believed ideals cease to make sense anymore.

As the journey proceeds and we encounter various places and characters, Greene also reveals the misery, poverty, disease and utter desolation that has engulfed these wastelands. He captures the feeling of the place and the moment with just the right words. Through his words, you can almost feel the oppressive heat or the thundering rainstorm or the tranquility and freshness of an early morning. Different characters that we meet give a sense of how bleak and despairing their life is. There is a person who cannot shirk off the idea of death, there is another with a desperate cheerfulness who has to constantly remind himself that he is happy. There are several instances where we see the difference between the world-view of adults and children. Adults who have known better times and have only those memories to draw any happiness from. While the only world their children have seen is this world of misery. These children haven't known what happiness, hope or faith means. They have matured before they have aged. All the playfulness and innocence of childhood has been drained away.

Another frequently encountered theme is that of abandonment. The words 'abandoned', 'abandonment' crop up very often..be it a man who has abandoned his family, a child abandoned by her father, a man deserted in the forest. However, what Greene is really hinting at is the abandonment of this land and its people. They are cut-off from the rest of the world to rot in suffering, while the world and civilization outside progress. The future holds no promises, all hope and faith has vanished. Life has ceased to have any meaning, God himself has ceased to exist. Death is an everyday affair for them and life is just a duty to be performed from day-to-day without ever knowing its joy and charm.

She said: "I would rather die."
"Oh," he said, "of course. That goes without saying. But we have to go on living."

"She was one of those garrulous women who show to strangers the photographs of their children: but all she had to show was coffin."

For the most part the novel is bleak and grim, but it speaks of hope as well.

"It is one of the strange discoveries a man makes that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration: there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times:even in danger and misery the pendulum swings."

Greene also reminds us of how peace and beauty can exist in the smallest of moments, which people often fail to notice until it has been left far behind.

"It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company-his alone-ness was like a threat of things to come. Suddenly he remembered - for no apparent reason - a day of rain at the American seminary, the glass windows of the library steamed over with central heating, the tall shelves of sedate books, and a young man - a stranger from Tucson - drawing his initials on the pane with his finger - that was peace. He looked at it from outside: he couldn't believe he would ever again get in."

There is so much more I have to say about this novel, I could never cover it all in a review. Let me just say it is so very human.

3.68 stars. 3.85 stars

So, my first jaunt into book club territory. What do I bust in with? The Power and the Glory. What an idiot I am.

I have to say that this is probably not a book that I would have picked if left to my own devices. My first introduction into Greene was The End of the Affair and that’s only because I’m a sucker for a good ‘woe is me’ story. Bitterness and anger to unknown deities? Rock on! But, put into this context - in this setting - I have to admit that I felt a bit lost.

Backtrack: My ‘experience’ with religion is this: Raised ���catholic’ (read: baptismal based on criminality of original sin, catechism classes to become ‘confirmed’ so that I can get married in a church—of course I married a Jew at a duck pond, so, oops.) My knowledge of religion in general centers around lots of viewings of Last Temptation of Christ and an overbearing sense of guilt for all things.

So, I got the whole abandonment of God from Affair because who doesn’t want to lash out when they see their potential love life ruined by (unfounded) religious belief? Duh. Place me into the 1930’s Catholic Persecution in Mexico and watch me flounder.

That being said, this book isn’t difficult. I enjoyed Greene’s prose. Man, this guy could write. There are so many passages that I was dumbstruck by. So many wonderful observations made. I just couldn’t be empathetic. There were no characters that I grabbed onto and wanted to either shelter or strangle. I need that hook, I need to feel invested. The protagonist in the story, the ‘whiskey priest’ should be this character, but for some reason, I always felt he had an agenda. That even when he was supposed to be absolving himself of his sins, I never quite believed he meant it. He was in it for the (yep, here it comes) the power and the glory. But, I never hated him enough to care. Sure, there were scenes where I might feel anger or pity, but nothing strong enough to make a lasting impression and when his fate is doled out, I’m impassive.

Maybe it’s the fact that this is written in the 3rd person, that we don’t really see what is in the mind of these characters. They each have an important role to play and when these roles converge, the story is impeccable. I can’t find a fault in it. But, again, I can walk away from it.

So, this being Greene’s ‘greatest novel’ makes me (again) feel like a dolt. I should have more appreciation for the subject matter and the controversy and all that, but I need instant gratification. Life’s too short. I won’t continue to ramble on plot or characters as I think some of my peers in The Power and the Glory Group did an excellent job of reviewing but I did do some research on this book in hopes of raising it to a 4 star rating and what I came across that peaked my interest was how it was noted that this book parallels T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (which I’d never read before):

The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.



Good stuff.

A typical Greene, I guess. This one is situated in the outback of southern Mexico, where a militia is hunting priests. Greene has chosen the last priest (on the run) as his protagonist. He's a real antihero: he's lonely and desperate, an alcoholic, at odds with the church, in short, no martyr at all, but just because of that truly human, fit for divine grace. Greene seems to make a reckoning with the church, yet at the same time -through the padre - he accentuates the mystery of faith, illustrating the ambiguous relation he himself had with the church. It's an interesting read, but I must say it feels a bit outdated; it's difficult in the 21st century to relate to the rather heavy themes of Greene (I can relate more to The Quiet American and The Human Factor). Stylistically the first part at times is a very slow read, picking up pace in the other parts through the dialogues. (2.5 stars)

The Power and the Glory has often been considered Graham Greene’s masterpiece in his beloved literary works. This book was published in 1940 after Greene had visited Mexico in the late 1930s gathering material for the book. The novel’s hero is known as the “whiskey priest” and is on the run from Mexican authorities after a state governor has ordered the military to dismantle all vestiges of the Catholic faith. The novel follows the journey of the “whiskey priest” as he evades state persecution in the 1930s. Churches are burned and relics, medals and crosses are banned. Any disobedience is punishable by death. This unnamed priest travels in secret, celebrating Mass and hearing confessions under the cover of darkness. Yet this priest is also a flawed man consumed by his own vices and his religious ambition of his earlier years has been replaced by a constant desire to drink. He is a deeply flawed man. This is a violent and raw novel about suffering, strained faith and ultimate redemption. The Power and the Glory speaks to the relationship between a priest’s humanity and God’s divinity and redemption. This is shown vividly throughout the novel in how this broken and fallen man’s life brings grace and humanity to others. This was a beautiful book, albeit a little gritty, to read during the Christmas season.

n  

“Already clouds were darkening the heavens, and President Calles was discussing the anti-Catholic laws in the Palace at Chapultepec. The devil was ready to assail poor Mexico.”

“He knew he was in the grip of the unforgivable sin, despair.”

“That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt. . .”

n

Review to follow

At first, it seems pretty evident: the Power belongs to Mexican army in Calles’ time, which tries to usurp the Glory that belongs to God by hunting down priests all over the country, closing churches and punishing often by death those who dare express their beliefs or protect fugitive clerks.

Between men’s Power and God’s Glory, an unnamed figure stands tall even when he is knelt down by his own deficiencies.

He has all the traits that should depict an antihero: he’s a pathetic drunkard, who does not hesitate to indulge himself and drink the Mass wine, he’s often a coward who lets the others protect him while knowing he puts their lives in danger, he has committed an unforgivable sin for a Catholic priest by conceiving a child, in a word he seems (and considers himself) unworthy, like a Dostoievskian character without the incessant garrulity, depending on others to be saved and anaemically trying to fight against his basic urges without great success.

So humble is he in his acknowledgement of his own weakness, so resigned, that even his redemption has nothing spectacular at first: he reluctantly accepts to visit a sick woman whom he knows he cannot really help (but he interrupts his road to safety to do so), he is remorseful for fathering a child (but whom he cannot help loving), he accepts to baptize the children in a village for a fee (but he will donate almost all the money to help the same villagers) and finally he accepts to come back from safety to help an American die (but he knows he will fall into the police trap). These little parentheses, these little “buts” form his Glory, as well as his weakness is his Power.

Like in a bildungsroman (even though he is not a teenager anymore), he strengthens his character little by little, wandering like a mendicant monk from village to village, begging for wine, fighting with a crippled dog for a bone, stealing a lump of sugar from the lips of a dead infant, going to prison, escaping his followers and especially his personal Judas, a half-caste whose role is exactly the same: to lead him to death knowingly: because this is his final act that redeems not only himself but all human condition – the power to sacrifice himself by free will, that is, because he wanted to, because he chose to offer help even when he knew he was led to death. The silent dignity, without big gestures, au contraire, with his usual weaknesses on display, with drink to give him courage, the fear not of death but of suffering, the last word which is an excuse.

Against the Power of tyranny that thinks to know what is better for all, the Glory of humanity is not necessarily a big gestured heroism, just as a hero is not a concept, a model stepping out of a myth (like the martyr Juan in the story told by a mother to her children) but an imperfect man, so beautiful and tragic and proud in his weakness, humility and unworthiness.

I liked this Greene novel slightly less than my favorites The Comedians and The Heart of the Matter, but it is still extraordinary writing. The Catholicism of the author is ever-present, but not distracting. As usual, don't expect happy endings with Graham, but definitely revel in the beautiful writing and wry humor despite the dim prospects for love or happiness.

I had a hard time finding some sympathy for the whiskey priest

Back in Greene-land, and this time a novel I'd never read before. The Power and the Glory (1940) takes a while to hit its stride however by halfway I was captivated

It's another of Greene's Catholic novels. In this novel it's a very bad time to be a Catholic. The book's hero is an unnamed priest on the run in a poor, remote section of Southern Mexico near Concepción, Tabasco. The paramilitary Red Shirts, who existed during the 1930s, have taken control. A state governor has ordered the dismantling of all vestiges of the religion. God has been outlawed, and the priests are being systematically hunted down and either killed or forced to marry.

While many clerics give up their beliefs and accepted government pensions, our unnamed priest travels in secret, celebrating Mass and hearing confessions under the cover of night.

A hero then? No. He's also a deeply flawed priest with vices aplenty, and any religious ambition has been replaced by a constant desire to drink, hence Greene's description of him as a "whiskey priest".

It's another Greene masterclass and a superb, subtle, clever and provocative read.

4/5



The Power and the Glory (1940)

In a poor, remote section of Southern Mexico, the paramilitary group, The Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest is on the run. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the nameless little worldly “whiskey priest” is nevertheless impelled toward his squalid Calvary as much by his own compassion for humanity as by the efforts of his pursuers.

John Updike calls The Power and the Glory, “Graham Greene’s masterpiece…. The energy and grandeur of his finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist.”

«Η δύναμις και η δόξα» είναι ένα μυθιστόρημα καταδίωξης και απόπειρας φιλοσοφικής / ιδεολογικής έκφρασης με αρώματα απο κίτρινο λιβάνι,
κόκκινο κρασί, πράσινο βάλτο, ανθρώπινη λάσπη
και αίμα, μιας ιερής αυτοαναιρούμενης
Καθολικής - Κομμουνιστικής συνείδησης.

Η πλοκή και η αγωνιώδης εξέλιξη της ιστορίας μας λαμβάνει χώρα στην Λατινική Αμερική όπου απεικονίζεται με έντονο και παραστατικό τρόπο η επιβάρυνση μιας εξαθλιωμένης πλέον κοινωνίας απο διαφθορά, βία και ιδεολογική τυραννία.

Στο Μεξικό την δεκαετία του 1930 κάτω απο ένα βάναυσο καθεστώς ιδεολόγων που θα μπορούσαν να είναι φασίστες ή κομμουνιστές χωρίς την παραμικρή διαφορά, επικρατεί με απόλυτη βασανιστική και απάνθρωπη διαφθορά χρησιμότητας μία εξουσία ολοκληρωτική, η οποία αναπόφευκτα καταλήγει σε έναν ευρύτερα κατανοητό φασισμό Καθολικής εξάπλωσης και γενικής παραίτησης.

Η καταδίωξη ενός ιερέα εθισμένου στο ποτό, πνιγμένου απο ιδεοληψίες και τύψεις αγάπης για το εξώγαμο παιδί του και τις κοσμικές του αξιώσεις για εκμετάλλευση είναι όλη η πλοκή και η «πυρηνική» μας βάση.
Γύρω απο την αυτήν υπάρχουν πολλά πρόσωπα και σκληρές σκηνές δορυφορικής λειτουργίας που υποδύονται την προδοσία, την ξιπασιά, την αγνότητα, την ελπίδα, την απάθεια, τη δυστυχία και την συγκατάβαση.
Ο φοβικός μεθυσμένος ιερέας της αυτοθυσίας αντιστέκεται στην θρησκευτική απαξίωση της εξουσίας και αρνείται να αποποιηθεί τους ιερούς του όρκους ενώ παράλληλα προσελκύεται ολοένα και πιο πολύ προς τη δική του εξολόθρευση μέσω ψυχολογικών καταναγκασμών.

Η προφανής συσχέτιση της αναπόφευκτα αμαρτωλής θυσίας του παπαμέθυσου με εκείνη του Ιησού Χριστού φαίνεται να ειναι η κεντρική ιδέα του βιβλίου.
Ασφαλώς υπάρχει και άλλη εξήγηση για την δέσμευση του ιερέα.
Θα μπορούσε η χριστιανική ιεροσύνη να προνοεί μια δέσμευση κοινωνικής αρχιτεκτονικής όπου
ο καλός/κακός καταδιωκόμενος είναι το ίδιο
καλός/κακός με τον διώκτη του.

Η δύναμις και η δόξα ανήκει στ�� πολύ καλά έργα της λογοτεχνίας, όμως προσωπικά τα φιλοσοφικά- θρησκευτικά- ιδεολογικά μηνύματα του συγγραφέα με απέκρουσαν διανοητικά σε μεγάλο βαθμό.


Καλή ανάγνωση!
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.

Here we have a novel which takes faith at face value which for an atheist reader is a bit of a thwack round the fizzog with a wet towel. This novel is all about the confession and all about the Mass. (And a little bit about the baptism too.) And the reality behind these rituals is that if they aren’t done properly (by a priest) YOU yes YOU could end up going to HELL because you might then die in a state of mortal sin, i.e. outside the reach of the grace of God, these are the rules, don’t look at me like that, it’s tough I know, because Hell means infinite pain for all eternity and God will be okay with that because He created Hell and created these complicated rules so you better get a priest over right NOW since you’re looking a bit green and your eyes are puffy. You could keel over at any minute.

So babies will get roasted in Hell if they don’t get baptized? So when the priest blesses the bread it then TRANSUBSTANTIATES into the actual body of Christ which is God although it still looks like bread, so that when the priest puts it in the mouths of his faithful flock he is putting God into their mouths literally? (this is what the priest in this novel says).

The first thing I think when confronted with these concepts, which millions have believed and still believe, is that I’m glad I don’t believe this kind of stuff because it seems to be very bad for your mental health which Graham Greene amply demonstrates. And it’s this exact kind of stuff which so outraged the guys who made the Mexican revolution in the 1920s that they set about crushing and destroying the Catholic Church, to the extent of hunting down and shooting priests. And I was completely unaware of that! So when I was reading Graham Greene’s novel and I found it was about a priest being hunted down by the military not because he’s a criminal but because he’s a priest I was like….. wow. Heavy. And this really happened? Yes, it really did, in Mexico, between 1926 and 1934.



Two things about this particular priest – he’s not got a name. Now why do authors do this – have their protagonist being all nameless? It just makes it a bit portentous. That wasn’t good. The other thing is that he’s a whisky priest, the definition of which is that he’s a bad one, an alcoholic, he’s fathered a child, he’s not very pious. He spends many pages desperately trying to get his hands on a bottle of brandy or two.

The whole novel is about him being hunted up mountain and down canyon often on the back of a mule (just like Jesus!) by the also-nameless lieutenant. He’s now the last priest in the state, all others having been shot or they’ve vamoosed or they’ve been forced to marry a woman (no! – fate worse than death to a priest!) and so been de-fanged. But our Father Nameless has ducked and dived for eight years but now he’s getting to the end of his tether. As Martha and the Vandellas sang in 1964, there’s nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide. No village will give him shelter, every man could be his Judas Iscariot.

So why didn’t this very bad priest just take a slow boat to China or give up and get married? After all, this isn’t some brave wanna-be martyr for the Holy Roman Apostolic Catholic Church. He’s a sniveling whining self-loathing reptile most of the time. But he himself provides a great explanation. When he realized he was the last priest in his state, he was filled with euphoria. Now at last there were no fellow priests to sneer at his drunken lacksadaisical ways. He could make his own rules up! He could be exactly the kind of priest he damn well wanted to be and no one to give him a hard time any more!

I think that the novel wants in the end to show that martyrdom for the true faith can happen even in the squalor of this unpleasant man’s life, and that the power and the glory may sometimes be located in the filth and the vileness. Something along those lines, I wasn’t too sure of the moral of it all. What it meant to me was something quite different

This was is a surprisingly savage nasty grim miseryfest, a real feel-bad book for Catholics, atheists and Mexicans alike.

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church".
Thus Tertullian wrote in Apologeticus, chapter 50. He kind of knew what he was talking about, as he lived long before the glorious days of triumphant Christianity - long before Constantine's mother started throwing tantrums and her son realised Pope Sylvester was not merely fucking around with chalices and wafers ("In hoc signo vinces": how about that, Marshall McLuhan?).
Like it or not, Tertullian's words summarise the essence of Christianity better than the whole Summa Theologiæ.

No doubt Christianity was born of a bloodshed; it also thrived in it, though. I daresay it owes everything to it. Its most sacred rite is an act of sublimated cannibalism we inherited from the human butchery of ancient Canaan. The Christian God offered His Only Son (capital letters are compulsory) so that we could stop slaughtering our own firstborn children and wash our sins in their blood.
Let's face it: although not overtly nuts as the worshipers of Kali, we've always been quite obsessed with blood. The early Christians went through persecution with a feverish lust for physical and psychological abuse. It was not death as such that could satisfy their hunger for holiness: it had to be long, painful and humiliating. To the delight of Krafft-Ebing and Bataille, they had to cross the threshold of Heaven leaving a trail of blood behind them.
A couple of centuries later the blood was no longer their own. It was that of their enemies.

The problem is, once in a while it happens again. Let aside the internal affairs (schisms, reformations, counter-reformations and settling of accounts) Christianity does have enemies: either it is in Queen Ranavalona's Madagascar or in pre-Commodore Perry Japan, beyond the iron curtain or in the African wilderness, martyrdom is always at hand. If nowadays there's no Nero using the devotees as human torches to illuminate the streets of Rome, it's just because we have subtler means to perform pogroms and murders - namely politics and legal systems.
One of the relatively recent persecutions took place in Mexico during Calles' presidency. In 1926 the government declared the Catholic Church to be the source of all evil and started a violent purge against both the clergy and the religious population; all throughout the following decade the people's reaction was fierce and 70.000-85.000 people died in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

British journalist and newly converted Graham Green visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution and was therefore first-hand witness of the atmosphere of those years. "The Power and the Glory" is the way Greene, looking back at the tragedy one year later, came to terms with his own inner concerns and religious contradictions.
The protagonist is a nameless alkie priest wandering through the Mexican waste lands, chased by the government's hangmen and consumed by feelings of inadequacy and sense of guilt. His past is not exactly immaculate indeed, as it seems to validate all the anticlerical stereotypes people is usually fed by hostile ideologues. He considers himself unworthy of everything he's got, even persecution. Suffering in the name of the Lord is an honour he doesn't really deserve, or so he thinks.
The thing is, the man's the only priest available. Hungry, exhausted, terrified, reeking of cheap booze, he's the last of his kind and feels the terrible burden of his function - a stigma he just can't rid himself of, despite the overwhelming fear. Isn't that the true nature of faith anyway? In his own words,
"To believe in peace was a kind of heresy".
In fact hatred and betrayal are everywhere and the enemy is closing in, but he can't surrender, even though the only way out is death: surrender would be a fate worse than death, the ultimate failure in his miserable existence. He's given up on himself already... he's not going to give up on God too. Thus he keeps celebrating the outlawed Christian rites among the poor and the desperate, all along the road leading to his doom. Whereas the respectable clergy chose either escape or betrayal, Greene's wretched priest is called to become a martyr.

Heat. Bugs. Toothless mouths. Greasy hair and unwashed bodies. Stinking ratholes and rotting mud huts. By his own admission, Graham Greene wrote most of this book while on benzedrine - and it definitely shows. In a good way, that is.
Greene's writing style is elegant and atmospheric; his descriptions of the Mexican landscape are incredibly vivid and real (especially if you read the novel while the temperature is 40°C, drenched in sweat, mosquitos feasting on your legs), not to mention the way he portrays the characters' physical and moral ugliness, which can be compared to the Western Expressionism of Alejandro Jodorowsky's "El Topo" or the (few) gems of what they called Spaghetti Western - that peculiar blend of Italian histrionics and cardboard Americana of the 60s and early 70s.
The narration is balanced, with no redundant details nor convoluted subplots. The dialogues are also well-written; all the characters sound natural and the author makes clever use of both flashback and stream of consciousness, with an excellent sense of depth and psychological introspection.

However, it would be pointless to draw parallels between Greene's conversion to Catholicism and the subject of his novel. Let alone his motives (he had to so in order to marry a Roman Catholic), the author's attitude toward religion was quite different - he was hardly tormented by the sort of doubts, shame and self-contempt at the core of his priest's personality.
Greene was neither a frustrated ascetic nor a repentant sinner; his devotion was more cerebral than emotional. His main interest was in the human dimension of faith, seen as the source of empathy and compassion and therefore as a common experience taking place beyond the confined space of individuality.

My first Graham Greene was definitely worth reading. Only thing, I would have liked more blood.