The Power and the Glory is the most critically acclaimed work of the English novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991). It was inspired by a trip Greene made to Mexico in 1938 to report on the plight of religion in Mexico. We think of Mexico as a Catholic country, but in 1917 an anti-clerical constitution was adopted, and as increasingly brutal ideologues came to power in the various states intolerance turned into active persecution, “the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere,” Greene wrote, “since the reign of Elizabeth I.” Priests who still ministered to the people did so secretly and at the risk of the their lives; nuns were expelled from convents and forced to live as laywomen; so much as saying a prayer in public was a crime. The main character of the novel is a priest who travels from place to place administering the sacraments and trying to escape capture by the government, represented in the story by the figure of the Lieutenant, a literally militant atheist with utopian socialist ideals.

Greene is known for creating plots that highlight the ethical complexity of human life, where right and wrong are intertwined in a way that makes facile moral judgments impossible. The novel’s protagonist is an alcoholic priest who has fathered a child, but is he a bad man? How can the Lieutenant’s vision of social justice coexist with his cold-blooded pursuit of the priest? Each of the main characters in the novel lives out some kind of ethical paradox, which forces the reader to ask: how ultimately are we to judge the moral character of our fellow human beings and of ourselves?