For the last few months, Katie, my wife, and I haveincluded as partof our spiritual practice reading together(hopefully) edifying books that we take turns selecting.This week,we just started reading Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, I am embarrassed to say, for the first time.I was already struck by these lines from his introduction:
[T]he 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 whether of the right or of the left, with which the Church of Rome is often compared, 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 publisher. There was no public condemnation, and the affair was allowed to drop into that peaceful oblivion which the Church wisely reserves for unimportant issues.
Though I have only read the first few chapters, it is quickly becoming clear that Greene's sense of paradox is not only reserved for "extraordinary circumstances," and it is perhaps notjust the "unimportant issues" that the Church would be wise to consign to "thatpeaceful oblivion." The novel pits a morally and politically idealistic lieutenant against a conflicted and morally questionable priest.In the end, I have a hunchthat the lieutenants quest for moral and political perfection will prove more oppressive and inhumane than thepriest's very human sinfulness. Regardless of the outcome though,the thoughts ofanother priest, Padre Jos,who is being called to bed by his mistressearly in the book, made me think ofthose illustrious clerics who would choose to deny Eucharist to pro-choice politicians:
He shivered: he knew he was a buffoon. An old man who married was grotesque enough, but an old priest... He stood outside himself and wondered whether he was even fit for hell. He was just an old fat impotent man mocked and taunted between the sheets. But then he remembered the gift had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnationthe power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God. Some mad renegade Catholic, puffed up with the Governor's politics,had once broken into a church (in the days when there were still churches) and seized the Host. He had spat on it, trampled it, and then the people had got him and hanged him as they did the stuffed Judas on Holy Thursday from the belfry. He wasn't so bad a man, Padre Jos thoughthe would be forgiven, he was just a politician, but he himself, he was worse than thathe was like an obscene picture hung there every day to corrupt children with.
Of course, I don't imagine that all, or even most, clerics have reason to think of themselves as "obscene pictures," but before condemning politicians or parishioners for wrestling honestly with theambiguous moral tragedies that confront us every day, among which abortion seems to be paramount these days, they may do well to consider the brazenly paradoxical nature of their own vocation as mere mortals imbued with the power bring forth the body and blood of Christ. One would hope that this "power" would, as in the case of Padre Jos, be a source of humility and not superiority, and that faced with the impossible task of living into such a vocation, priests would be moved toward compassion forthose of us, who ingood faithare just trying to live intoour ownparadoxical callings.Finally, if silence is one reverential response to the sanctity of a life that cannot be held by rigid moral maxims, perhaps the Church, in Her wisdom, might see fit to consign even (or, perhaps,especially)Her most important issues to peaceful oblivion.
