By Graham Greene

“Do you think God wants you to stay and die—a whisky priest like you?”

The Power and the Glory Green Was My Valley is the story of a man on the run—and not just any man, but a Catholic priest. 

In 1930s Mexico, the government continues its brutal persecution of the Catholic Church, forbidding the Mass and sacraments, and executing any priest who defies this order. 

For the man on the run, the defiance, the close escapes, the courage to die—it all comes from weakness, not strength. He knows he is a sorry excuse for a priest—the people have a word for his kind: “a whisky priest”—and he has more to show for sin and scandal than sanctity.

Now hard on his heels is an unrelenting hunter: an unnamed official who has shot or subverted every single priest in his state and who will not rest until his final prey
is brought to bay.

On the run, the whisky priest finds opportunity to bring Christ to the people—not just in the sacraments, and unworthily at that, but also in himself, by his own fumbling sacrifices and clumsy attempts at cooperating with divine grace, all the way to the bitter but glorious end of realizing that there is only one thing that counted: to be a saint.

First published in 1940, The Power and the Glory honors and illuminates the extraordinary mystery of love. Through his “whisky priest” and his world, Greene has refuted the absurdity of evil with the paradox of the cross—the instrument of that mysterious Love which, in the words of François Mauriac, “seizes miserable man at the very depths of his ridiculous misery and his derisory shame, and makes of him a saint and a martyr.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) was an English writer and novelist and one of the most distinguished authors of the twentieth century. Averse to being called a “Catholic” novelist, he still achieved his best work in his novels with Catholic themes—foremost among them The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.

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Hardcover: 216pp., with ribbon

ISBN: 978-1685954840