“‘I’ve told lies, I haven’t fasted in Lent for I don’t know how many years. Once I had two women-- I’ll tell you what I did...’ He had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world of which he was only a typical part-- a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant. How often the priest had heard the same confession-- Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. 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.” --The mestizo and the “whiskey priest” in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (p. 97)
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 01:49:17 +0000