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
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The Atlantic | July/August 2001 | Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier | Godman
his bewilderment at differences of culture and outlook. Greene's mentality
was "odd and paradoxical, a true product of the disturbed, confused, and
audacious character of today's civilization," he wrote. "For me, the book is
sad." Sadness and sorrow, rather than anger and indignation, colored his
tone. The work's title implies an emphasis on God's power and glory, but
as the consultant read the book itself, he found only a barren landscape of
despair. "Immoral" or married priests; the ambiguity with which the
central figure refers to God and the doctrines of the faith; the conviction or
the virtue attributed to Protestants and atheists—all this made it impossible
for Greene's first reader in the Holy Office to see why the book was
regarded as excellent literature. "Troubling the spirit of calm that should
prevail in a Christian," The Power and the Glory, in his judgment, ought
never to have been written. Since the novel had been written, and
published, and widely disseminated, the consultant hoped that its fame
was already in decline. A condemnation would do no good, because the
author, with his "paradoxical modes of thought," would probably not
accept it, and the repercussions of an intellectual condemnation could be
dangerous, given the author's fame. Better, the consultant recommended,
to have Graham Greene "admonished" by his bishop and "exhorted to
write other books in a different tone, attempting to correct the defects of
this one."
The opinion of the second consultant, delivered in Latin, supported that of
the first. Both readers acknowledged that Greene was not only the leading
Catholic novelist in England but also a convert from Protestantism.
Despite his many failings, the comfort he offered to enemies of the
Church, and his "abnormal propensity toward ... situations in which one
kind of sexual immorality or another plays a role," it would not do to put
him on the Index, because his book was a best seller. The second censor
therefore concurred that Greene should be told that "literature of this kind
does harm to the cause of the true religion," and that "in the future he
should behave more cautiously when he writes."
The mindset of Rome's censors was not malevolent. It is difficult,
however, to resist the conclusion that it was dim. Defensive about their
authority (which they desired to assert even as they doubted its efficacy),
and incapable of grasping the conceptual problems posed by Greene's
writing, they could be checked in their course only by intervention from
above. That intervention came on October 1, 1953, in the form of a
confidential letter written by a highly placed colleague in the Vatican's
Secretariat of State. It was a protest addressed to Giuseppe Cardinal
Pizzardo, the secretary of the Holy Office.
Years ago, I had occasion to read [The Power and the
Glory] which a priest had pointed out to me as a highly
significant work of contemporary romantic literature. It is
indeed a book of singular literary value.
I see that it is judged a sad book. I have no objection to
make to the just observations in the [censure of] this work.
But it seems to me that, in such a judgment, there is lacking
a sense of the work's substantial merits. They lie,
fundamentally, in its high quality of vindication, by
revealing a heroic fidelity to his own ministry within the
innermost soul of a priest who is in many respects
reprehensible; and the reader is led to esteem the priesthood
even if exercised by abject representatives ... I venture this
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