The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, 3 of 3

Part 3: The Reaction

Greene once asked (through correspondence) Evelyn Waugh: "Must a Catholic be forbidden to paint the portrait of a lapsed Catholic?"

I hope the answer is NO, or Catholic literature is in trouble.

Later in that same letter, from January 1961:

"What I have disliked in some Catholic criticism of my work . . . is the confusion between the functions of a novelist and the functions of a moral teacher or theologian.

The Power and the Glory was condemned by Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, from the Vatican's Holy Office, because it was "paradoxical"--in short, sympathetic to the whisky priest rather than condemning his sins (Literature Suppressed On Religious Grounds by Bald and Wachsberger). Pizzardo actually requested that Greene make alterations to the novel!

Bald and Wachsberger relate other gems: "In a 1948 essay "Why Do I Write?," Greene defended his right to be "disloyal" to the church . . . [Greene] thought he must be able to write "from the point of view of the black square as well as the white." Greene was well-aware that pedantic Catholic fiction would be disastrous: the work must be organic, dramatic, and honest to the realities of the Catholic world, a world in which evil exists in equal (or greater?) parts than good.

Bald and Wachsberger continue that Greene offered the character of the whisky priest in part as a reaction to the more superficial brand of Protestant criticism that the Catholics idolized the role/position of the priest. Greene states that "the man's office doesn't depend on the man. A priest in giving sacrament believes his giving the body and blood of Christ, and it doesn't matter whether he himself is a murderer, an adulterer, a drunkard." Fascinating stuff, and one can't help but read Greene himself into the statement: the imperfections of the Catholic writer enhance, and do not detract, from the "good work" of his/her writing.

Much has been made of Greene's "Marxist Catholicism," his material support of revolutionaries AND ministries. I am continually intrigued by his complexities, and will certainly revisit his other work on this site.