Georg Gaston commented on the irony of the situation:

Only one priest seems to be left, and he looks to be merely a grotesque parody of his vocation because he has a terrible weakness for the various sins of the flesh and he appears to be inept at performing his duties. Yet because he has remained, the atheistic state, vividly [embodied] by a lieutenant, feels compelled to hunt him down.

When the priest does find brief sanctuary before being called to minister to the Gringo, he takes up residence with an American couple. The Americans consider themselves “good people,” read the Bible, don’t believe in superstition or liturgy, but have no real concern for the people around them. The reader notices what the whiskey priest doesn’t: the drunkard priest is a better Christian than these Western hypocrites:

He interrupted the woman savagely, “Why don’t you confess properly to me? I’m not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night…remember your real sins.”

“But I’m a good woman, father,” she squeaked at him with astonishment.

“Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people?” He said, “Have you any love for anyone but yourself?”

“I love God, father,” she said haughtily….

“How do you know? Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man—or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “It’s wanting to protect Him from yourself.”

It is this which eventually saves the whiskey priest. He knows his calling, and does it—unlike the rich and docile Westerners. The atheistic Mexican government realizes that the service which the priest renders to his itinerant congregations is an infinitely more dangerous threat than anything that rich capitalist foreigners could ever provide. The young boy at the end of the novel, after hearing the story of Father Juan and the martyrdom of the whiskey priest, sees the atheistic lieutenant walking under his window, and he spits contemptuously at him. This simple act sparked by the martyrs’ story is the kind of rebellion which the earthly rulers fear the most. No matter how many churchmen are killed, there will always be some tall pale stranger to take their place.

The opposition between the authority of the Church and the domination of the State is foundational to The Power and the Glory. At the outset of the novel, the whiskey priest, as a type of the entire Church, is on the run from the State authorities. No Christian is free to express support of the Church, although the faithful few still harbor the priest and keep him safe. The modern State realizes that the prophetic voice and the liturgy of the Church are its strongest weapons, and so the Church is forbidden to speak publicly against the government, and is stripped of its places of worship and vestments. When the priest is finally captured, the lieutenant taunts him:

“I suppose,” the lieutenant said, scowling ahead, “you’re hoping for a miracle.”

“Excuse me. What did you say?”

“I said I suppose you’re hoping for a miracle.”

“No.”

“You believe in them, don’t you?”

“Yes. But not for me. I’m no more good to anyone, so why should God keep me alive?”

“I can’t think how a man like you can believe in those things. The Indians, yes. Why, the first time they see an electric light they think it’s a miracle.”

“And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead you might think so too…. Can’t you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn’t breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart’s not beating: he’s dead. Then somebody gives him back his life, and they all—what’s the expression?—reserve their opinion. They won’t say it’s a miracle, because that’s a word they don’t like. Then it happen again and again perhaps—because God’s about on earth—and they say: these aren’t miracles.”

The priest’s words, “God is about on earth,” are a formidable threat to those who denied His very existence. But what frustrates the modernist even more is that, like Flannery O’Connor said, God chooses to work through very real, concrete, and fallen vessels. For Greene, too, this Catholic emphasis gives his stories a particular edge. No matter how ill-equipped a minister of grace might be, they can still be converted by God into a tremendous weapon against the powers and principalities of the age. When the new priest shows up at the door of the boy’s home, it is the worst thing that President Calles and Governor Canabal could have imagined. If the rulers of this age had known this would happen, they would not have sent the pitiful priest before the firing squad.

The vision of Graham Greene may at times seem horrific and humorless, particularly when compared to earlier Catholic novelists like G.K. Chesterton (whom Greene admired very much). Vivian Greene once commented on how her husband’s novels were the reverse of Chesterton’s irrepressible optimism; though only separated by a generation, Chesterton and Greene lived in two different ages. Similarly, there is noticeable difference between Evelyn Waugh and Greene that goes beyond literary styles. Greene, perhaps because he was never able to embrace the faith to the same degree as Waugh, felt a closer kinship with the modern world around him. The promises of sensual escape proved irresistible to Greene. Waugh himself commented how his friend’s later novels began to show evidence of a lost faith: “Pray God it is a mood, but it strikes deeper and colder. What is more—no, less—Graham’s skill is fading… He complained of the heat of his sexual passions, now at their coldness.” Greene himself commented in an interview two years before his death that his youthful indiscretions had proved too great an obstacle to spiritual faithfulness. But old age, he said ruefully, lacks even the momentary pleasures of sin.
Of course, as his friend Evelyn Waugh might have told him, Greene’s ultimate contraction of ennui could have been avoided. Even at the very end of his life, Greene expressed a desire to believe: “I pray at night … that a miracle should be done and that I should believe.” But it was too much to believe in angels, demons, Satan, hell, and the other supernatural elements of the world. Like Maurice Bendrix, Greene prays to the God he cannot quite believe in. God demands just too much. If only He would be content with intellectual assent—this much Greene was willing to give. But God demanded the body as well as the mind. If only He were a vapour—if only.

Ultimately, Greene’s self-posed paradox—in fiction and in life—is that the body must either be given over to momentary pleasure and everlasting death, or to momentary death and everlasting pleasure. The body will either come to the end of pleasure in old age, or it will be crucified with Christ and, like the bloody crucifix and the sin-racked body of Sarah Miles, be transformed into a vessel of grace.

As Evelyn Waugh’s son, Auberon, commented in an obituary, Greene was “a good man and a confused man who did not always follow logic.” For all Greene’s inconsistency, his stories reflect the barren spiritual wasteland which his generation inhabited. Even when he calls out to God or the gods, they can’t hear. The empty tombs of the hollow cathedrals stand as judgments on those who walk by, but only echo back their empty prayers.

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.