Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier

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The Atlantic | July/August 2001 | Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier | Godman
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Contents | July/August 2001
In This Issue (Contributors)
More on books from The 
Atlantic Monthly.
More on politics and society 
from The Atlantic Monthly.
The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2001 
 Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier 
Documents from the archives of the Holy See reveal the deliberations among 
papal censors over how to deal with The Power and the Glory—and wise 
counsel from an unexpected source
 
by Peter Godman 
 
..... 
 
n common with many Catholics," Graham Greene wrote in a letter 
to The Times of London in June of 1954, "I have little regard for 
the Index in the rare cases in which it deals with imaginative 
writing ... So far as imaginative literature is concerned (according 
to rumor both Tolstoy and Lewis Carroll have been condemned) most 
Catholic laymen follow their own consciences." Greene was ostensibly 
responding to a letter in The Times that had drawn a comparison between 
the Roman Index and prosecutions for obscenity in British courts. What 
readers of the newspaper could not have known was that Greene himself 
had just been sternly reproached by Church authorities. Greene alluded to 
this episode in later writings. The records of the deliberations at the 
Vatican over his novel The Power and the Glory, first published in 1940, 
have recently come to light. They provide a rare glimpse into the exercise 
of what was once a great power, and one of particular interest in the 
history of twentieth-century literature—the power of the Church to ban the 
books it deemed dangerous or offensive.
The Vatican had sought for centuries to wield influence over various kinds 
of writing; in 1571, at the height of the Counter-Reformation, it 
established the Congregation of the Index, a department responsible for 
censoring and even banning books (when it had some power over the 
author or the publication process), or at the very least for telling Catholics 
which books they simply shouldn't read. The Congregation of the Index 
was abolished in 1917, but censorship continued to be exercised by 
another department, the Holy Office, and an official Index of Forbidden 
Books was maintained until 1966. 
How did the Holy Office operate during a tense and troubled period in 
recent history such as the Cold War? What was its policy toward Catholic 
authors? To what extent was it informed about new developments in 
scholarship and literature? What kinds of internal disagreements did the 
department experience? Such questions are prompted by the cases of a 
number of twentieth-century writers, some of whom were converts to the 
Church of Rome. Greene was one of these. In the introduction to a later 
edition of The Power and the Glory he wrote, 
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The Atlantic | July/August 2001 | Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier | Godman

The Archbishop of Westminster read me a letter from the

Holy Office condemning my novel because it was

"paradoxical" and "dealt with extraordinary circumstances."

The price of liberty, even within a Church, is eternal

vigilance, but I wonder whether any of the totalitarian states

... would have treated me as gently when I refused to revise

the book on the casuistical ground that the copyright was in

the hands of my publishers. There was no public

condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that

peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for

unimportant issues.

In July of 1965 Greene had an audience with Pope Paul VI. He told the

Pope that The Power and the Glory had been condemned by the Holy

Office. According to Greene, the Pope asked, "Who condemned it?"

Greene replied, "Cardinal Pizzardo." Paul VI repeated the name with a

wry smile and added, "Mr. Greene, some parts of your book are certain to

offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that."

These sentences have intrigued me ever since I first read them, some years

ago, in Greene's Ways of Escape. The records of censorial investigations

undertaken after the death of Leo XIII, in 1903, are in the archives of the

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and are not available to be

consulted by outside scholars. In February of last year I sought and

obtained an audience with the Congregation's prefect, Joseph Cardinal

Ratzinger. To my request that an exception be made to the rules, the reply

was one word, uttered without hesitation: "Ja."

he Power and the Glory is set in the southern-Mexican state of

Tabasco, which is governed by a ruthless persecutor of Catholics,

Tomas Garrido Canabal. It is based on a journey to Mexico that

Greene made in 1938. An atheist and a puritan, Canabal detested

organized religion and alcohol. The central figure in Greene's book is a

whiskey priest, who is put to death by Canabal's police at the end of the

novel. The priest, whose prime quality is self-knowledge, is his own

strongest critic. Although he anticipates his execution, and knows that he

is walking into a trap, he chooses to perform what he sees as his duty and

attempts to give the last sacraments to a fatally wounded criminal. The

priest puts the chance of saving another man's soul ahead of his own

survival. Is this martyrdom? Or is it retribution for moral lapses? 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.

Denunciation or inquiry was the usual means by which news reached

Rome of a book that deserved investigation. In the case of The Power and

the Glory, the news traveled circuitously. Its point of departure was

Einsiedeln, in Switzerland. There, in 1949, the Catholic publisher

Benziger was planning to bring out a German translation of the novel.

Alarmed by the "polemic" that he claimed Greene's book was raising in

France, a Swiss priest asked the Holy Office for its opinion. Pressure

slowly mounted over the years from other parts of Europe, and finally, in

April of 1953, Rome looked into the matter closely. Greene's case was

examined (as were similar cases involving Evelyn Waugh and Bruce

Marshall). The Holy Office appointed two consultants to consider The

Power and the Glory. The first of these wrote in Italian, and he displayed

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/godman.htm (2 of 7) [11/28/2001 10:06:40 PM]

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