The Power and the Glory

First published in 1940, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory unfolds in 1930s Mexico, where an anticlerical government has outlawed the Catholic priesthood. Its central figure, an unnamed, alcoholic priest known as the whisky priest, moves from village to village, pursued by a determined lieutenant who believes that eradicating religion will bring justice to the poor. Despite his fear, moral failings and awareness of his own unworthiness, the priest continues to serve a community deprived of its religious life. Greene transforms this tense pursuit into a profound exploration of sin, mercy, faith and the troubling distance between moral goodness and spiritual grace.

Among Greene’s most celebrated novels, The Power and the Glory draws on the religious persecution he encountered during his travels in Mexico, combining the suspense of a fugitive’s journey with the intensity of a spiritual drama. Its portrait of a flawed man struggling to fulfil a sacred duty challenges conventional ideas of heroism and holiness, finding the possibility of grace not in perfection but in human weakness. Stark, compassionate and unsparing, the novel remains a defining work of twentieth-century Catholic literature and one of Greene’s most searching meditations on the nature of belief.

From the book

“Hate is a lack of imagination.”

— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

On The Power and the Glory

“The book of his held highest in popular as well as critical esteem.”

— John Updike, The New York Review of Books