The Power And The Glory

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith writes:

My Mexican wanderings are now drawing to an end, and I find myself in the country’s second city, Guadalajara waiting for my flight back home via the United States. Guadalajara, or GDL to use its popular acronym, is a sort of Mexico in miniature. It has some splendours, but many squalours. The most picturesque places in this country are the small colonial towns, such as San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato and Zacatecas, places with real charm. GDL, by contrast, may have started out as a small colonial town back in the sixteenth century, but it has grown and grown, and swallowed all its near neighbours. It is not the size of Mexico City, but it is as big as London in its extent – a vast sprawl in every direction, consisting mainly of single story houses.

GDL does not have the world class museums that grace Mexico City, or some of its astonishing Art Nouveau architecture, but it does have some rather nice things to see. There is the former orphanage, now called the Instituto Cabanas, used as an arts centre, perhaps one of the finest colonial buildings in the country. Built in the classical style, it consists of a series of austerely beautiful patios, with a deconsecrated chapel in the form of a Greek Cross at its centre, decorated with murals by Jose Clemente Orozco, one of this country´s great twentieth century artists.

The Cathedral is in a melange of styles, gothic, baroque and classical, its interior painted white. But for something all of a piece one should go to the Templo Expiatorio some twenty blocks from the centre. This is Mexico´s finest example of neo-Gothic, indeed it probably counts as the finest piece of neo-Gothic anywhere on earth. As the name suggests, the church was a conceived as an expiatory temple to the Blessed Sacrament, in the late nineteenth century. It took almost a hundred years to build. The nave is lined with rose windows, which is most unusual. The buoilding next door has some tracery that is clealry modelled on the Papal Palace at Viterbo, but the main thrill is to be had by approaching the main altar and raising one’s eyes to the vast spire above one, which consists of tracery and coloured glass – the nearest thing one will get to to a gothic dome.

One reason the Temlo Expiatorio took so long to build is that the construction was held back by the Mexican revolution and the attendant persecution of the Church, along with the financial collapse that the revolutionary years brought in their wake. The church was not built to expaite the crimes of the revolution, being conceived before that, but the martyrs of the revolutionary period, most of whom were from Jalisco, the state which has GDL for its capital, are commemeorated in the stained glass.

Funnily enough the Mexican revolution is something we English think we know quite a bit about, as we have all read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory which to me will always be one of the greatest books ever written. The novel deals with the persecution of the Church in Tabasco, where it was especially fierce, and where many churches were demolished, but most of the martyrs come from the north of the country, Jalisco and Zacatecas in particular; there church furnishings were destroyed, but buildings were spared, though, as the Cabanas Institute and other places around GDL show, there were plenty that were deconsecrated.

If you have not read The Power and the Glory, please do read it. Don’t let the author’s reputation put you off. It is the greatest argument for Catholicism ever made: and it bears all the signs of being made in Mexico!

In his 2003 book, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, Fr Ian Ker devotes the first three pages on Greene to the question of whether or not Greene “ever believed in hell and mortal sin”, rather than in, as Greene himself put it, “a sort of purgatory.” This is because “the two themes, together with the possibility of forgiveness in Confession and the unlimited mercy of God, are integral to his finest writing, which is what makes his denial so paradoxical.” In order to explore Greene’s use of these themes, it is necessary to “see how he blends these most traditional Catholic motifs with two very contemporary influences on the novel to create an altogether new kind of fiction in the English language. These two related influences, of which Greene was very conscious, are the cinema and the thriller.”

Cinematic technique is more conducive to Catholicism, which engages all the senses and is particularly concerned with visual culture, than to classical Protestantism, which emphasises, practically to the exclusion of all else, the written and preached Word, so that it could not have spread as it did but for the invention of the printing press. In the new, visual age of the late twentieth century, even Evangelical churches moved in a Pentecostal and Charismatic direction, the more to encourage “physical body movements rather than cerebral preaching and reading”.

But in that century’s middle years, there was simply no doubt that Catholicism, with its “stained-glass windows, pictures, and statues” appealed to the camera in a way that the reading out of long Biblical or Prayer Book passages, incorporating extended preaching on the former, simply did not. In the post-Conciliar age, there is a lesson here, for all the importance now attached, perfectly correctly and fully within Sacred Tradition, to Scripture and to Holy Preaching. This reviewer recalls here Jean Baudrillard, who sees in the dispute over the Postmodern celebration of the image the conflict between the French Jesuits and Huguenot iconoclasm.

The thriller, in turn, lends itself especially well to the cinema, and vice versa, as Greene illustrated so powerfully in The Third Man, actually written with a view to the screen adaptation that it did indeed so famously receive. Greene’s use of cinema and of the thriller genre is very Chestertonian, and Chesterton enables us to see it as fundamentally Thomist: great art, communicating great ideas, is made possible, even most possible, by adapting the medium and the genre that speaks most powerfully to Toots, to Miss Podsnap, to the Misses Pecksniff, to Sam Weller and the rest (in a word, to Saint Thomas’s rusticus), because it speaks most powerfully of them and for them.

Today’s demonisation of the white working class (many of whom, as in Greene’s or Chesterton’s day, are Catholics) represents the spectacular failure of the well-meaning but ill-grounded attempts by George Orwell, Christopher Hill and E P Thompson to rescue that class’s (largely Catholic) culture from what Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”. Instead of the Marxism of Hill and Thompson, or the most peculiar ideological mélange of the overrated Orwell, it was necessary then, and is necessary now, to look to the tradition – the Sacred Tradition – of Saint Thomas, of Chesterton and Chesterton’s Dickens, and of the Catholic Greene; the Sacred Tradition of Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism; the Sacred Tradition that speaks the most powerful truths through means such as the thriller and the cinema.

And what could be more powerful than treatments of sin and damnation, and of the possibility of redemption therefrom with the sacramental system provided by a Church which, in Britain at that time, still found Her following overwhelmingly from among the people who most frequented the cinema and most read thrillers, whom Dickens might have created, whose wisdom was recognised and articulated by Chesterton and by Saint Thomas? And is not evil the stuff of which thrillers are made?

Greene saw the connection between this and Catholicism when he witnessed the latter’s persecution in Mexico and during the Spanish Civil War: “the four key ingredients of Greene’s most creative period could now gel together – evil, Catholicism, the cinema, and the thriller.” While this remained most vital to him, he produced his best novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. It is those who actually believe in hell and the devil that are closest to them. In Britain in the middle twentieth century, those were the Catholics.

Would that they still were, and that Catholics still recognised the reality of evil in the midst of what Chesterton, Dickens and Saint Thomas recognised as the flawed beauty of this world. In today’s Anglophonia, the reality of hell and the devil, and the consciousness of personal and societal sin, is most evident among those who do not share that Chestertonian, Dickensian, Thomist optimism, while that optimism has become perverted into Pelagianism, universalism, antinomianism, and an essentially Whig or Marxist belief in the perfectibility of this world by purely human efforts.

Alas, Greene was to head down that road, and even to lead others down it, in his later life. The Catholic who reads, admires, marvels at and even loves Greene’s Catholic quartet must constantly be asking “Why?”, looking for the seeds of future degeneration from orthodoxy, and prayerfully taking care to avoid ingesting those seeds. A not conspicuously pro-Catholic cultural elite’s exaltation of Greene as post-War Britain’s pre-eminent and definitive Catholic writer has achieved its end, and made Greene’s later views de rigueur for the Catholic middle class that was only beginning to appear at the peak of Greene’s powers, but which has come to predominate among British Catholics.

Thus, in his Conclusion, Fr Ker opines that “Greene’s reputation … is inflated because of interest in his colourful private life and because so many of his novels were so topical at the time of their setting”, whereas Waugh’s “unfashionable views and cultivated eccentricities have helped conceal his greatness as a novelist”. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that, while there was merit in much of what he articulated about how liturgical changes were often gone about in the immediate post-Conciliar period, Waugh’s (reactionary) response to Vatican II is almost as problematical as Greene’s. But of that, another time.