In life and in fiction, Greene was more interested in sinners than saints, and the whiskey priest is no saint—at least not for most of the story. If anything, he’s closer to the modern conception of the antihero. His pride swells his sense of importance. In one village, where the faithful fear retribution from the military officers, the priest hesitates to leave: “Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake, even if they were corrupted by his example?” Later, he’s selfish, crude, and heretical in one stroke: He eats a sugar cube that he discovered by a dead child’s mouth, rationalizing, “If God chose to give back life, couldn’t He give food as well?” In these and countless other examples, Greene shows how easily dogma can disappear in the face of desperation.

But beneath the darkness of the priest’s actions is faith, which he bears witness to in two pivotal scenes. Arrested for possessing outlawed alcohol, he’s thrown into a small jail cell with a “pious woman,” who later notices a couple having sex in the corner. “The brutes, the animals!” she exclaims. And yet the priest counsels the woman to not think that their action is ugly, “Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.” In lines that reflect the lived truth of Lenten struggle, the priest explains, “Saints talk about the beauty of suffering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Suffering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner—to them.” Greene’s aversion to sentimentality makes for palpable theology. He finds God in dirt and in blood—in the Christian struggle to make faith matter in life.

Ironically, the pious woman is herself the antithesis of Lenten reflection. The priest asks her to pray for him, but she responds, “The sooner you are dead the better.” He thinks about how he can’t see her face in the dark, and uses that blindness as a metaphor for judgment and misunderstanding: “When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

Nevertheless, after publication not everyone was convinced of The Power and the Glory’s spiritual value, least of all some members of the Vatican, which had been alerted to its questionable content. Greene’s literary celebrity at the time caused some high-level Catholic officials to fear how influential his novel’s depiction of Catholicism would be. One of the consultants appointed to assess the novel concluded that “literature of this kind does harm to the cause of the true religion.” As Peter Godman noted in a comprehensive 2001 piece on the novel for The Atlantic, “The moral and theological criteria of The Power and the Glory are ambiguous—so ambiguous that self-appointed censors have sniffed an odor of heresy in the book.”