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The Power And The Glory Rhetorical Analysis

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It is not the differences in humanity that bring division, but the inability to recognize, embrace, and celebrate those differences. In Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, his provocative tone is most potent when he attempts to expose the faults within the Church. Greene also using elements such as the setting of the plot to further progress the plot. Take for instance, the climate of Tabasco is either blazingly hot, or wet and muddy. There seems to be no mediation, only extremes. This is compared to the harsh political climate of the state. Additionally, Greene writes his novel not like a book to be read, but instead like a sermon to be heard. His use of descriptive language paints a motion picture, his prose reads as a movie. The dilemma …show more content…

When he is asked about the matter, he replies, “The Church taught that it was every man's first duty to save his own soul.” (Greene 49). The Catholic Church always taught simpler truths to appeal to a more general crowd, but at some point one has to draw a line. The Priest follows a very loose rule of “practicing what you preach.” Secondly, the priest himself cannot back his preaching up with a purpose like the lieutenant. The lieutenant justifies his actions saying, “He stood with his hand on his holster and watched the brown intent patient eyes: it was for these he was fighting. He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt.” (Greene 129). Contrastingly, the priest has doubts in his own faith, which is ironically the faith he is upholding even though he risk being martyred. In the novel, Greene makes it clear that the priest is no monsignor. The priest has no doubt in the fact that he is a “bad priest” (Greene 34), and understands why God may react towards his actions with a strong hand. Although, he does not understand why God does not favor those lay people who are more pure than himself. For example, when he comes across the woman in the street unhooking her child from a cross, he wonders to himself, “Did she expect a miracle, and if she did, why should it not be granted her, the priest wondered? Faith, one …show more content…

One of the reasons Greene rallies for the continuation of the Church is the numerous rich bouts of culture that the Church brought to Mexico. Greene captures this essence when the Whiskey Priest says, “You don't remember the time when the Church was here. I was a bad Catholic, but it meant—well, music, lights, and a place where you could sit out of this heat—and for your mother, well, there was always something for her to do” (Greene 45). As the persecution of the Church progressed, events such as these began to become nonexistent. Greene shows the Church as the only provider of cultural essence to Mexico. Additionally, even though Greene presents the Whiskey Priest far from a Savior, he does carry some of the characteristics of one. More specifically, the Priest can almost be represented as a Christ figure. Christ identified not with the sinless, but with the lepers and murderers. The Priest followed the same principles and exemplified the same characteristics. Even though he wasn’t perfect as Jesus was, he was willing to risk his life for the forgiveness of sinners. In the novel, Greene is noted saying, “It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt” (331). Alan Grob makes an interesting summation of the

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