Do holy orders hold when one has abandoned their morality? That’s the question Greene explores in The Power and the Glory.

The novel is set in the Tabasco region of Mexico in the mid 1920s when the government banned the Roman Catholic church from operating. Priests were forced to be married, thus revealing the impotence of their vows. Greene follows one particular priest, the “whisky priest,” as he’s physically and spiritually chased throughout the region.

The whisky priest, as his name suggests, is no paragon of virtue. He has a child whom he loves, yet he wrestles with a lack of compunction over his abandonment of celibacy. He loves communion wine a little too much. He tries to abandon his territory regularly but is always pulled back in. The force that pulls him back in is what makes the novel so fascinating. Despite his moral failure, the whisky priest can never escape the pull of his vocation.

I searched second-hand bookstores for quite a while before finding this because of Eugene Peterson’s recommendation in Take and Read. It’s not hard to see what he found so compelling in this redemption story.

Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory. 1940. Don Mills, ON: Bellhaven House, 1965.