The Power and the Glory

While Part 1 introduces the setting and the characters instrumental in telling the whisky priest’s story, Part 2 focuses solely on the priest and his journey, which is as much psychologically painful as it is physically grueling. He confronts his past in his former parish of Concepción, where he remembers his former ambitions—and cavalier attitudes—with regret. The villagers barely recognize him because he has become so gaunt: “It was as if he had returned to them in their vicious prison as one of themselves […] a peasant” (62). He no longer boasts the “soft superior patronizing hands” (62) of his heyday in the priesthood. Later, when he dreams about his past while in the hut with the mestizo, he remembers himself as “the fat youngish priest who stood with one plump hand splayed authoritatively out” (93). He was more concerned about his ambition, more convinced of his superiority, and more secure in his authority than interested in the lives and needs of his parishioners. Now he’s an emaciated echo of himself, hunted, forsaken, and addicted to alcohol. He embodies the Biblical proverb that pride goes before the fall, highlighting the theme of The Power: Government Control and Religious Authority. Indeed, his trajectory appears almost to justify the state’s persecution of priests and the Church.

Concepción, the name of the village, is symbolically resonant because it’s where he and one of the villagers, Maria, conceived a child. The child becomes the living incarnation of the priest’s mortal sin, and his refusal to repent her existence compounds this fact. The “small, malicious child” (65) seems doomed to bear the burden of her father’s sins. Her behavior is confrontational and defiant, and her own mother condemns her as “bad through and through” (79). Tainted by an excess of original sin, Brigitta represents the end of faith, “dying out between the bed and the door—the Mass would soon mean no more to anyone than a black cat crossing the path” (79). The priest himself envisions her faithlessness, her doom: “It was like seeing his own mortal sin look back at him, without contrition” (67). Her future is fathomless and likely limited. Nevertheless, the child also represents a salvific impulse deeply buried within the priest: He loves her, regardless of her provenance, and refuses to renounce her despite his vocation: “[T]his child was more important than a whole continent” (82). He’s a “bad” priest for not feeling this way about his fellow humans in general, he thinks, but his desire and willingness to save her—even as she rejects and despises him—reveals the possibilities for redemption that he yet harbors.

Upon arriving in the village, he agonizes over his duty: “Had it become his duty then to run away?” (64). He wonders whether he should try to save the villagers from the wrath of the government authorities, or if it “[w]asn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake” (65). The dilemma arises because the notion of duty is deformed by the officially sanctioned persecution of religion and its purveyors, again highlighting the theme of The Power: Government Control and Religious Authority. The priest is bound by his duty to the Church to administer Mass and absolution to his flock, but in doing so under these circumstances, he inevitably puts them in danger. The heart of the dilemma resides in the definition of death: He can stay and doom them to a bodily death, perhaps murder by the relentless authorities, or he can flee and doom them to a spiritual death in a state of unabsolved sin. This argument extends to the problem of the priest’s suitability to his vocation in the first place. For example, when anyone suggests that in his persecution and death he might become a martyr, the notion alternately surprises or sickens others. After Maria mordantly defends him, disdainfully asking the police, “Do you think he looks like a priest?” (75), she rejects him, on behalf of the entire village, claiming, “We don’t want you anymore” (78), which is tantamount to suggesting that they don’t want religion itself anymore. Then she taunts him: “What kind of martyr do you think you’ll be? It’s enough to make people mock” (79). The priest is painfully aware of this irony. He doesn’t wish to associate his personal failings with the Church itself.

In prison, he again fends off the suggestion that his pursuers would make him a martyr; he isn’t suitable for the honor. He decides that “[h]e was a criminal and ought only to talk to criminals” (132) rather than dissuading the earnest believer of his worthiness. He forgets, or doesn’t acknowledge, that Christ himself died on the cross among criminals, inviting them to pass into the kingdom of Heaven alongside him. In releasing the whisky priest, the lieutenant once again confirms the priest’s status, ironically giving him a “five-peso piece,” which the priest remembers is “the price of a Mass” (140). Not only does the lieutenant fail to recognize the priest whom he has been pursuing, but he unwittingly compensates him for his services. In this act, the lieutenant shows the compassion of the Christianity he so fervently rejects.

The priest once again casts off on his journey, a seemingly endless slog filled with trials and sorrows. He has to leave his own daughter to her own questionable fate and then returns to the abandoned Fellows home, uneasy about the fate of Coral, a kind of surrogate daughter. He stumbles upon another abandoned village and a murdered boy, more signs of the gringo’s rampage and the need for compassionate service. The whisky priest wants to go home, wandering like an epic hero, but unlike Odysseus, he has become “unwelcome even in his own home” (62). Not until he reaches an unknown church can he rest, falling asleep “with home behind his shoulder-blades” (159). The Church is his only home, his sole sanctuary. Despite all his doubts and sins, the whisky priest seeks salvation.