Time Magazine named it one of the best English language novels since 1923. The novel, published in 1940, is widely praised as a masterful work of literature. He's not the stuff martyrs are made of, to put it kindly. This priest drinks a lot, as you'd expect, but he's also cowardly and unrepentant for many of his mortal sins. He's called a "whisky priest"-a derogatory term for morally weak or corrupt clergy. They didn't just step on each other's toes-they stomped on them.Īdding insult to injury, the fugitive priest is hardly a hero. The church and the state each had their ideas about how society ought to be run, and their ideas didn't dance to the same beat. The Roman Catholic Church, once the official religion of Mexico, had been suppressed by the government. You see, this was a time and a place in which being an active priest was a crime punishable by death. It's sort of like The Fugitive with a drunken Harrison Ford and a lot of religion thrown in. Set in a southern Mexican state during the 1930s, the novel tells the story of a vice-ridden runaway priest, a tenacious police lieutenant who hunts him, and the inhabitants of the land whose lives are altered by the chase. Far from it! This is the life of the unnamed priest in British author Graham Greene's acclaimed novel, The Power and the Glory. No, this isn't the newest hit action movie. For what crime do they want you dead, you ask? For being a priest. They've already murdered innocent people suspected of hiding you.
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