First published in England in 1940, The Power and the Glory deserves its reputation as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It comes close to being a perfectly realized work of art.An unnamed priest is on the run in a revolutionary Mexican state that has outlawed the Catholic religion. All the other priests have fled, been shot, or forced to renounce their faith. The last practicing priest is hardly an exemplar of the breed; he's overly fond of brandy, and has fathered a daughter by a woman from his last parish. Feverish, shabby, and scared for his life, he forces himself to hear confession and dole out the host to the spiritually ravenous peasants he encounters in his wanderings.As the priest wanders the state, he experiences a stripping away of his past identity. First to go are his dignity and social standing as a pampered parish priest. He misplaces his bible and over time loses the other ritual paraphernalia of his vocation. His shoes, pants and shirts wear out. He's constantly hungry, at one point fighting a crippled dog for a bone with a little meat left on it. Because his very presence brings danger to the villagers he's trying to serve, he can no longer take pride in the high price he pays for being God's remaining messenger. He realizes that martyrs aren't made from men like him. In the end, even the hope of final absolution and God's mercy are closed to him. Greene forces us to consider the following question: if you take away all that normally props up the sense of self, what's left that sustains us?What the priest receives at his lowest points are the twin gifts of freedom and compassion. Locked in a crowded jail cell (in one of the great scenes in English literature), he realizes that he has nothing left to lose. The dogma he had been clinging to melts away, and his heart swells with compassion for the undesirables who surround him. Without illusion, he sees the particulars of his surroundings with new clarity. And he realizes that "when you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity." The fallen priest does what Jesus did: he goes so deeply into his humanity that he transcends it. Through suffering, he achieves in his fallen state the miracle and the mystery that eluded him when he adhered to the strict teachings of his faith.The priest's nemesis is a soldier who is tasked to track him down. This unnamed Lieutenant feels a fierce, abstract love for his countrymen, even though he's willing to take and shoot hostages from the villages he suspects of sheltering the priest. The Lieutenant is determined to stamp out all vestiges of Catholicism in the state because he sees the church as complicit with the large landowners in oppressing his poor countrymen. He wants to give them real bread, and is enraged by their perverse insistence on receiving the ritual host that symbolizes the body of Christ. He's an intriguing character, a man filled with love that's fueled by hate. By the end of the book he begins to understand that even if he achieves his goals in furthering the revolution, personal peace will elude him.By the evidence of his writing, Graham Greene was extraordinarily clear-eyed about humanity and decidedly secular in his personal behavior. Why was he obsessed with the rigid dogma of Catholicism, to which he converted as a young man, and why do so many of his major novels deal with worldly men tormented by their religious faith? His novels and autobiography provide some clues. Greene seemed to view life as a dark and painful progression - one reason he wrote with such insightful particularity about rural Mexico. He used Catholicism the way people use Elavil, Paxil or Zoloft, to keep at bay the despair that comes from feeling the human condition too intensely. At the social level, he distrusted man's ability, absent God, to make clear the human mystery and to relieve the sources of human suffering. He would have agreed with Kant that "out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, no straight thing can be built."His faith helped him as a writer as well, providing a counterpoint to his keen reporter's eye and elevating the dilemmas of his characters to a higher moral plane. Catholicism, used as the argument for faith in the universal struggle between faith and unbelief, put a tension and a tensile strength into Greene's novels that would have been missing otherwise. In some of his other Catholic-themed novels (A Burnt-Out Case, The Heart of the Matter, the End of the Affair), the tension between faith and unbelief sometimes feels grafted on to the plot. In the Power and the Glory, these warring elements are beautifully, seamlessly fused in the person of the priest and the battered Mexican state through which he wanders. Which is, perhaps, the major reason this book is considered his masterpiece.Although Greene needed faith, he needed even more to reveal the truth of the world as he saw it, which is why he didn't use his gifts to become a great Catholic apologist, becoming instead one of the greatest English-speaking novelists.