The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

‘I could easily find out, couldn’t I?’ the half-caste said. ‘I’d just have to say—father, hear my confession. You couldn’t refuse a man in mortal sin.’

His conscience ceased to accuse him of uncharity. He knew. He was in the presence of Judas.

it was the only evidence left that life had ever been different: he carried it with him as a charm, because if life had been like that once, it might be so again.

little mild impious joke stared up at him in faded pencil—something about ‘of one substance’. He had been referring to his corpulency and the good dinner he had just eaten: the parishioners had not much relished his humour.

some woman had complained that bad books were being sold in Concepción, fetched in from the capital by mule: her child had got hold of one called A Husband for a Night.

The moment he had said that the local photographer had set off his flare,

We are a big parish and the priest has a position to keep up. I’m not thinking of myself but of the Church.

He talked for a long while, enjoying the sound of his own voice: he had discouraged Montez on the subject of the St Vincent de Paul Society, because you had to be careful not to encourage a layman too far, and he had told a charming story about a child’s deathbed—she was dying of consumption very firm in her faith at the age of eleven.

Perhaps Padre José was the better man—he was so humble that he was ready to accept any amount of mockery; at the best of times he had never considered himself worthy of the priesthood.

he had been simply filled with an overwhelming sense of God. At the Elevation of the Host you could see his hands trembling—he was not like St Thomas who needed to put his hands into the wounds in order to believe: the wounds bled anew for him over every altar. Once Padre José had said to him in a burst of confidence, ‘Every time … I have such fear.’ His father had been a peon.

His ambitions came back to him now as something faintly comic, and he gave a little gulp of astonished laughter in the candlelight.

if he had been humble like Padre José, he might be living in the capital now with Maria on a pension. This was pride, devilish pride, lying here offering his shirt to the man who wanted to betray him. Even his attempts at escape had been half-hearted because of his pride—the sin by which the angels fell.

When he was the only priest left in the state his pride had been all the greater; he thought himself the devil of a fellow carrying God around at the risk of his life; one day there would be a reward.

He prayed in the half-light: ‘O God, forgive me—I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs—protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them—not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things. Perhaps I had better escape—if I tell peo...

As usual his self-confession dwindled away into the practical pro...

‘Perhaps you’ve got him there—in a pocket. You carry him around, don’t you, in case there’s anybody sick. … Well, I’m sick. Why don’t you give him to me? or do you think he wouldn’t have anything to do with me … if he knew?’

He had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world of which he was only a typical part—a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant. How often the priest had heard the same confession—Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much.

It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

He prayed silently, ‘God forgive me.’ Christ had died for this man too: how could he pretend with his pride and lust and cowardice to be any more worthy of that death than the half-caste? This man intended to betray him for money which he needed, and he had betrayed God for what? Not even for real lust.

‘Get up. I’ll walk for a while.’ ‘I’m all right,’ the man said in a tone of hatred. ‘Better get up.’ ‘You think you’re very fine,’ the man said. ‘Helping your enemies. That’s Christian, isn’t it?’ ‘Are you my enemy?’ ‘That’s what you think. You think I want seven hundred pesos—that’s the reward. You think a poor man like me can’t afford not to tell the police …’ ‘You’re feverish.’ The man said in a sick voice of cunning, ‘You’re right, of course.’

Now if I was a rich man—only a little rich—I should be good.’ The priest suddenly—for no reason—thought of the Children of Mary eating pastries. He giggled and said, ‘I doubt it.’ If that were goodness …

Somewhere a long way off a cock crew.

One of the oddest things about the world these days was that there were no clocks—you could go a year without hearing one strike. They went with the churches, and you were left with the grey slow dawns and the precipitate nights as the only measurements of time.

You only had to turn up the underside of any situation and out came scuttling these small absurd contradictory situations. He had given way to despair—and out of that had emerged a human soul and love—not the best love, but love all the same.

A voice said ‘You are the priest, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ It was as if they had climbed out of their opposing trenches and met to fraternize among the wires in No Man’s Land.

But 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 attitudes 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, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats.

It was odd—this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.

It was like a religious ceremony which had lost all meaning, but at which they still wore their best clothes.

‘Why, man, you’re crying.’ All three watched the man in drill with their mouths a little open. He said, ‘It always takes me like this—brandy. Forgive me, gentlemen. I get drunk very easily and then I see …’ ‘See what?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know, all the hope of the world draining away.’

He can’t be doing any good—or any harm. Why, nobody even noticed he was about till a few months ago.’

words like ‘mystery’ and ‘soul’ and ‘the source of life’ came in over and over again, as they sat on the bed talking, with nothing to do and nothing to believe and nowhere better to go.

In the lamplight Padre José’s face wore an expression of hatred. He said, ‘Why come to me? Why should you think …? I’ll call the police if you don’t go. You know what sort of a man I am.’

He said, ‘If I ever offended you, José, forgive me. I was conceited, proud, overbearing—a bad priest. I always knew in my heart you were the better man.’

He tried to gather up his venom into spittle and shot it feebly at the other’s face: it didn’t even reach, but fell impotently through the air. He said, ‘Go and die quickly. That’s your job,’

He caught a glimpse of Padre José peering through a window and then an enormous shape in a white nightshirt engulfed him and drew him away—whisked him off, like a guardian spirit, from the disastrous human struggle.

That was the fallacy of the death-bed repentance—penitence was the fruit of long training and discipline: fear wasn’t enough. He tried to think of his child with shame, but he could only think of her with a kind of famished love—what would become of her? And the sin itself was so old that like an ancient picture the deformity had faded and left a kind of grace.

somebody had pencilled in a neat pedagogic hand a facile and over-confident statement about man having nothing to lose but his chains.

The old man said suddenly, ‘Is that you, Catarina?’ and his breath went out in a long patient sigh, as if he had been waiting a long while and could afford to wait a lot longer.

‘Bastard!’ the word filled him with miserable happiness. It brought his own child nearer: he could see her under the tree by the rubbish-dump, unguarded. He repeated ‘Bastard?’ as he might have repeated her name—with tenderness disguised as indifference.

‘They said he was no fit father. But, of course, when the priests fled, she had to go with him. Where else could she go?’ It was like a happy ending until she said, ‘Of course she hated him. They’d taught her about things.’ He could imagine the small set mouth of an educated woman. What was she doing here? ‘Why is he in prison?’ ‘He had a crucifix.’

They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It was their duty to teach-well, love.’ ‘You don’t know what’s right. The priests know.’ He said after a moment’s hesitation, very distinctly, ‘I am a priest.’

This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.

The priest said, ‘There’s no need for anyone to inform on me. That would be a sin. When it’s daylight they’ll discover for themselves.’

‘They’ll shoot you, father,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Yes. Of course.’

A man isn’t afraid of a thing like that.’ ‘No?’ the priest asked. ‘A bit of pain. What do you expect? It has to come.’ ‘All the same,’ the priest said, ‘I am afraid.’

You see I am a bad priest and a bad man. To die in a state of mortal sin’—he gave an uneasy chuckle—‘it makes you think.’

a martyr here …’ The priest giggled: he couldn’t stop himself. He said, ‘I don’t think martyrs are like this.

He was moved by an irrational affection for the inhabitants of this prison. A phrase came to him: ‘God so loved the world …’ He said, ‘My children, you must never think the holy martyrs are like me.

He had always been worried by the fate of pious women. As much as politicians, they fed on illusion. He was frightened for them: they came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity. It was one’s duty, if one could, to rob them of their sentimental notions of what was good … He said in hard accents, ‘I have a child.’

He couldn’t say to himself that he wished his sin had never existed, because the sin seemed to him now so unimportant and he loved the fruit of it.