\n\tDuring an era when the British Empire had spread its influence to all corners of the globe, lining their pockets with wealth and ancient artifacts, it is
\n\tperhaps comic retribution that one of Britain\u2019s most enduring imperial-era legacies in Central America is what we remember from a bumbling English novelist
\n\tand failed spy.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe seriousness of the circumstances likely undercuts the amusing nature of his travels; nevertheless, Graham Greene\u2019s accounts of his visit to Mexico are
\n\tsimultaneously bizarre and informative, both astounding and heartbreaking.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tGreene was the writer of two books addressing government persecution of the Catholic Church that he observed in Mexico during the 1930s: a nonfiction
\n\ttravelogue entitled The Lawless Roads, along with a novel, The Power and the Glory, about a morally weak, alcoholic priest seeking refuge from hostile
\n\tauthorities. At the geographic center of both of these is what Greene labels the \u201cGodless state\u201d of Tabasco, ruled by the aggressively anti-Catholic Tom\u00e1s
\n\tGarrido Canabal. It was in this land that Greene wrote some of his greatest work. Today many regard Greene, author of several other notable novels, such as
\n\tThe Quiet American and Brighton Rock, as one of the premier English-language novelists of the past hundred years. Indeed, Richard Grabman, author of Gods,
\n\tGachupines and Gringos: A People\u2019s History of Mexico, calls Greene \u201ca towering figure of twentieth-century literature,\u201d yet at the same time Grabman
\n\tquestions his Mexican mission, dismissing him as a \u201cclueless Englishman, a newspaper reporter who wrote detective fiction.\u201d1\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIf such remarks seem inconsistent, it may be because that nearly everything about Greene\u2019s time in Mexico seems a little baffling. Eager to explore the
\n\tchaotic region in writing through the blurring of both fiction and fact, Greene interlaced his own personal spiritual struggles with those of the Mexican
\n\tpeople. He discovered how contradictory the peasant attitude toward religion can be, and received a mixed response from friends in high places who could
\n\tnot decide whether to praise the stories of this reporter-turned-spy-turned-novelist as heroic accounts or condemn them as heretical.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIn order to understand the Mexico into which Greene entered, in the aftermath of the state suppression of the Catholic Church known as the Cristero War, or
\n\tLa Cristiada, it is important to appreciate the significance of the nation\u2019s fiercely contested land. In both his novel and his journalistic recordings,
\n\tGreene focuses heavily on the terrain of Mexico, its hills and soil, rocks and rivers. In his Lawless Roads description of Tabasco, however, Greene hardly
\n\twrote of the region as a desirable place. It was to him a quagmire, \u201ca swamp, with a mud river [alongside] a mud bank, like landing at the foot of a
\n\tmedieval castle [with a] ramp of mud and old tall threatening walls.\u201d2\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tGreene\u2019s descriptions of Tabasco are indeed haunting, almost tragic at times, but his fish-out-of-water, droll Englishness cannot help eliciting a chuckle
\n\tfrom time to time. He describes himself on a riverboat, trying to escape the mosquitoes that had a \u201cterrifying steady hum like that of a sewing machine\u201d by
\n\tgoing below deck, but found it so hot in the cramped conditions that he resorted to lying naked under a net, sweating profusely and drying himself with a
\n\ttowel. Greene also described his nauseating encounters with Mexican cuisine: \u201cAt mealtimes they made a shocking kind of coffee\u201d and a cook provided him
\n\twith \u201ca loaf of bread and a plate of anonymous fish scraps from which the eyeballs stood mournfully out. I couldn\u2019t face it,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand rashly made my
\n\tway to the privy.\u201d Privies, better known as bathrooms in the United States, make up several other amusing anecdotes of this slapstick Englishman: \u201cTwice I
\n\tdashed for the privy,\u201d Greene wrote, \u201cand the second time the whole door came off in my hands and I fell onto the floor.\u201d3\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tSubtlety and espionage were likely not among Greene\u2019s fortes. He would end up leaving Tabasco with a sour taste in his mouth, from things much more
\n\ttroubling than a plate of fish eyes. In The Lawless Roads he wrote that \u201cTabasco was a state of river and swamp and extreme heat\u201d where the common people
\n\twere prohibited from attending any church left standing. Anti-clerical fanaticism prevented them, as Greene would write, from enjoying their village\u2019s \u201cone
\n\tspot of coolness out of the vertical sun, a place to sit, a place where the senses can rest a little while from ugliness. Now in Villahermosa, in the
\n\tblinding heat and the mosquito-noisy air, there is no escape at all for anyone.\u201d4\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIn Greene\u2019s Tabascan novel The Power and the Glory, the motif of escaping is ever-present. For the long-suffering protagonist, the nonconforming \u201cwhiskey
\n\tpriest,\u201d life itself has become one constant attempt at escaping the anti-clerical soldiers—including one diabolically determined lieutenant, based upon
\n\tGarrido—who would have him executed. Despite his noble efforts providing Mass and confession to needy villagers, the priest is a paragon of immorality. His
\n\talcoholism is absolute, and he has fathered a child with a woman in his parish. He is lustful, selfish, and cowardly, and, notably, it is only through his
\n\tpersecution and eventual execution that he finds atonement. For readers at the time, the impoverished, persecuted priest who sleeps in animal dwellings
\n\trepresented a profound reversal of seemingly irreversible, sacred traditions.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tFor many centuries the Catholic Church in Mexico enjoyed a position of comfort and privilege, but its position as a significant landholder was of
\n\tparticular irritation to the common people, who would launch a monumental national revolution in 1910. The issue of land reform constituted the most
\n\tfrequent and longest-lasting complaint against the Catholic Church in Mexico. Once the Spanish withdrew, taking with them significant economic scaffolding,
\n\tin order \u201cto pay for imports and foreign services, Latin American nations turned to the production of agricultural commodities for which there was great
\n\tEuropean demand. This shift meant that the rural areas became more important than old colonial urban centers. The production of foodstuffs for the exports
\n\tmarket raised the value of land and led governments to confiscate the lands of the church.\u201d5 Successful land confiscation efforts led to an unsurprisingly
\n\tfrustrated priesthood, who would go on to support an ultimately unsuccessful foreign coup. Along with their conservative counterparts in government,
\n\t\u201cMexican clerics invited the Austrian Habsburg archduke Maximilian to become the emperor of Mexico [while] Napoleon III of France, who portrayed himself as
\n\ta defender of the Roman Catholic Church, provided support for this imperial venture,\u201d which would be doomed to fail only three years after it began.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tOpposition to the French invasion began with the Mexican victory at Puebla on May 5, 1862, an event commemorated today as Cinco de Mayo, and would
\n\tculminate a few years later when \u201cresistance forces captured the emperor and executed him [and although] the Mexicans had been victorious, their
\n\tvulnerability to foreign powers had again been exposed.\u201d6 The people did not forget the involvement of the clergy, and tensions between the church and
\n\tpopulist movements, specifically over the issues of land and influence, would simmer for decades.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tFollowing the Mexican Revolution, which lasted from 1910 until about 1920, and the intense suppression of the church that came as a direct result of
\n\tclerical resistance to the 1917 constitution, much of the Catholic population rebelled. Enrique Krauze, author of Mexico: Biography of Power, described the
\n\tbacklash against the laws of President Plutarco Elias Calles—specifically Articles 3, 19, and 130 of the Mexican constitution: \u201cThere were riots,
\n\tdemonstrations, fighting in the streets [because] church schools were closed and foreign priests expelled. They included punishments for crimes related to
\n\treligious teaching and worship. Article 19, the most inflammatory, made the official registration of priests obligatory before they could exercise their
\n\tministry.\u201d7\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe response to anti-clerical fervor reached its apogee during La Cristiada. The swift counterrevolution of the peasants—who, historically, had often been
\n\tat odds with the wealthy church—likely surprised Mexico\u2019s president. Calles, in what Krauze calls a \u201cbattle against religion and crusade for secular
\n\tenlightenment,\u201d believed he would be able to \u201csuppress the people\u2019s \u2018fanaticism\u2019 by cutting it off at the roots.\u201d However, \u201ca huge sector of the peasant
\n\tpopulation of \u2018Old Mexico\u2019 contradicted his illusions in armed rebellion. For them, the \u2018cause\u2019 was clear: They were fighting to bring back masses, they
\n\twere fighting to defend religion. Their war cry was Viva Cristo Rey!\u201d meaning, \u201cLong Live Christ the King!\u201d8\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe aftermath of what followed next became what Graham Greene wrote of in The Lawless Roads, calling it the \u201cfiercest persecution of religion anywhere
\n\tsince the reign of Elizabeth. The churches were closed, Mass had to be said secretly in private houses, to administer the Sacraments was a serious offence.
\n\tBut Mexico remained Catholic; it was only the governing class—politicians and pistoleros—which was anti-Catholic.\u201d9\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tLasting from 1926 to 1929, the Cristero War would eventually spread to 13 states throughout central Mexico, and came close to resembling the recent wars of
\n\treligion waged in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Krauze describes the conflict: \u201cIt would be a savage war on both sides, pitting groups
\n\tof mounted guerrilla fighters against a federal army that had recently been modernized. The modernization had followed the European model, concentrating on
\n\tinfantry supported by artillery and aircraft, and it had left the federal weak in cavalry essential for fighting in the territory of the Cristiada, where
\n\tthere were few highways and entire regions inaccessible to ground troops. Calles thought the uprising might be over in a couple of months. But without any
\n\treal central organization, the peasants fighting for their religion became bands of guerrilla warriors, capturing weapons from their enemies and waging a
\n\tferocious war.\u201d10\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tKrauze lists the damages: by the end of the bloody rebellion, the federals had hanged men, burned villages, and \u201cshot priests, about ninety of whom were
\n\texecuted during the war. Twenty-five thousand Cristeros had died in combat. The Cristiada cost upward of 70,000 lives, [caused] a precipitous drop in
\n\tagricultural production, a decline of 38 percent between 1926 and 1930, an internal migration of 200,000, as well as an external migration, mostly to the
\n\tUnited States, of 450,000 people.\u201d11\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tGreene, himself a devout Catholic convert, made his journey to Mexico in 1938 to observe this devastation and witness the Cristiada\u2019s aftermath firsthand.
\n\tAmong those who had survived the war, he discovered despair and resignation. From one interview Greene conducted, a woman explained that when they died
\n\tthey would \u201cdie like dogs [and] no religious service was allowed at the grave.\u201d In another discussion with a villager from Villahermosa, Greene learned
\n\tjust how complex and sometimes paradoxical the relationship between the church and its members could be. When speaking with the local dentist, Greene
\n\targued against the dentist\u2019s assertion that going against the church \u201cnever pays.\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cBut he seems to have won,\u201d Greene said. \u201cNo priests, no churches . . .\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOh,\u201d the dentist said illogically, \u201cthey don\u2019t care about religion round here. It\u2019s too hot.\u201d12\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThese experiences would become part of his later novel, The Power and the Glory, but Greene\u2019s voyage was about much more than artistic and literary
\n\tambition. Grabman explains, \u201cHired by a Catholic newspaper, Greene went to Tabasco to write an undercover report on religious persecution. He was an
\n\tincompetent spy and an unhappy tourist—but a brilliant writer.\u201d13\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe anti-clerical barbarism that Greene observed in Tabasco, which he would use as the setting for The Power and the Glory, originated nearly entirely from
\n\tthe office of the state governor, the quasi-Fascist dictator, rabidly anti-Catholic Tom\u00e1s Garrido Canabal, Tabasco\u2019s persecutor-in-chief. Despite the
\n\tcessation of Cristero hostilities in most parts of the country, \u201cin the crucial oil state of Tabasco, Tom\u00e1s Garrido Canabal was left as governor. He used
\n\this position to launch a crusade against the old enemies of the people—the rich and the church. He rewrote state laws to limit the Catholic priesthood to
\n\tmarried men over 60—since Catholic priests could not be married, this effectively outlawed priests—and decreed the death penalty for nonconforming
\n\tpriests.\u201d14\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tAmong Garrido\u2019s most distasteful acts include naming \u201chis prizewinning seed bull after the pope, making fun of clerical celibacy.\u201d Much more horrifyingly,
\n\t\u201cfor the edification and entertainment of the people, he had the cathedral in Villahermosa blown up. Garrido took a more sinister turn with the \u2018Red
\n\tShirts,\u2019 modeled on such political gangs as Mussolini\u2019s \u2018blackshirts\u2019 and Hitler\u2019s \u2018brownshirts.\u2019 They were sent to beat up Garrido\u2019s opponents, smash up
\n\tchurches, and organize antireligious ceremonies, usually featuring desecration of religious objects.\u201d15\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tGreene himself learned how Garrido, who was also an anti-alcohol crusader, installed within his Red Shirts such an anti-religious fervor that they even
\n\tcrossed into neighboring Chiapas hunting for priests or churches. He referred to Tabasco as the \u201cisolated swampy puritanical state of Garrido Canabal—who,
\n\tso it was said—had destroyed every church. A journalist on his way to photograph Tabasco was shot dead in Mexico City airport before he took his seat.
\n\tPrivate houses were searched for religious emblems, and prison was the penalty for possessing them. A young man I met in Mexico City was imprisoned for
\n\twearing a cross under his shirt.\u201d16\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe observations Greene makes within The Lawless Roads become most interesting in how they provide so directly the source material for his novel The Power
\n\tand the Glory. The origin of his fictional story about the whiskey priest who lives in hiding is not difficult to identify. Greene heard, while approaching
\n\tTabasco by boat, that in that state \u201cevery priest was hunted down or shot, except one who existed for ten years in the forests and swamps, venturing out
\n\tonly at night; his few letters . . . recorded an awful sense of impotence—to live in constant danger and yet be able to do so little . . . hardly seem
\n\tworth the horror.\u201d Speaking later in Tabasco with a local doctor, Greene \u201casked about the priest in Chiapas who had fled. \u2018Oh,\u2019 [the doctor] said, \u2018he was
\n\tjust what we call a whiskey priest.\u2019\u201d17\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIn The Lawless Roads Greene recorded the sights and sounds, and spoke with the dockworkers, dentists, and doctors of Villahermosa, the town that would
\n\tserve as inspiration for the fictional locale in The Power and the Glory. In one instance he takes a solemn walk to visit the remains of the dead. Greene,
\n\tthe journalist, writes:\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe only place where you can find some symbol of your faith,\u201d he reflected, \u201cis in the cemetery up on a hill above the town. [There is] a great white
\n\tclassical portico, the blind wall round the corner where Garrido shot his prisoners, and inside the enormous tombs of aboveground burial, crosses and
\n\tweeping angels. [I get] the sense of a far better city than that of the living at the bottom of the hill [where] I visited with the dentist.\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThe reader encounters many of Greene\u2019s very same observations in The Power and the Glory, although through his lens of imagination instead. In the opening
\n\tpages of his novel, the narrator expresses an equally dim, though categorically fictive, view of the region, its geography, and its leadership. Greene, the
\n\tnovelist, writes: \u201cThe Treasury, . . . a dentist\u2019s, the prison . . . and the steep street down past the back wall of a ruined church. . . . The whole town
\n\twas changed; the cement playground up the hill near the cemetery where iron swings stood like gallows in the moony darkness was the site of the cathedral.
\n\t. . . The lieutenant lay on his back with his eyes open. He remembered the priest the Red Shirts had shot against the wall of the cemetery up the hill,
\n\tanother little fat man with popping eyes.\u201d18\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tWith so many of the Englishman\u2019s passages from his nonfiction travelogue serving as inspiration for fiction, it leaves an impression on those who read both
\n\tbooks that maybe Greene grew conflicted over the best way to impress upon others the gravity of the situation in Tabasco. It could suggest that perhaps
\n\tGreene was unable to let go of his experiences in Mexico, was unable to detach himself from the fight for Catholic belief that he witnessed, and that
\n\tperhaps the author\u2019s problems ran deeper than textual criticism. Richard Grabman explains that in so many of Greene\u2019s novels the writer couldn\u2019t help
\n\treturning \u201cagain and again to the problem of holding on to one\u2019s beliefs, often Roman Catholic beliefs, under stress.\u201d19\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t Greene\u2019s theology of redemption through persecution and the desire for the spiritual alleviation of guilt clearly applied as much to his own life as that
\n\tof his characters. However, even the theology of The Power and the Glory, like the whiskey priest himself, could not escape the clutches of watchful
\n\tauthorities. Like his blurring of fiction and fact in Tabasco, his theology also muddied the waters to the point of ambiguity, according to Peter Godman of
\n\tThe Atlantic:\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cAlthough [the whiskey priest] anticipates his execution,\u201d Godman explains, \u201cand knows that he is walking into a trap, he chooses to perform what he sees
\n\tas his duty and attempts to give the last sacraments to a fatally wounded criminal. The priest puts the chance of saving another man\u2019s soul ahead of his
\n\town 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
\n\tambiguous that self-appointed censors sniffed an odor of heresy in the book.\u201d20\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tIt must have been particularly painful for Greene that The Power and the Glory—the novel in which he painfully exposed his own moral shortcomings, risked
\n\this safety in Mexico to research persecution, and staked his reputation as a novelist and Catholic reporter to write—created controversy in the Vatican\u2019s
\n\thalls of power. Despite Greene recording for the world and for posterity some of the worst human rights abuses and religious persecutions taking place
\n\tagainst Catholics at that time, the cardinals in Rome were displeased and condemned his book.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\tSo when he met with Pope Paul VI in 1965, it is easy to imagine that all of Greene\u2019s sins and immoralities, his failures as a Catholic, and the years he
\n\tmay have considered as wasted in Mexico were at the front of his mind and that an in-person, papal rebuke of his book was soon to follow.\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cMr. Greene,\u201d Pope Paul VI began, \u201csome parts of your book are certain to offend some Catholics.\u201d The pope understood the concept of Christian redemption,
\n\tas implied by his following advice to Greene: \u201cBut you should pay no attention to that.\u201d\n\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During an era when the British Empire had spread its influence to all corners of the globe, lining their pockets with wealth and ancient artifacts, it is perhaps comic retribution that one of Britain\u2019s most enduring imperial-era legacies in Central America is what we remember from a bumbling English novelist and failed spy. The seriousness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[305],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-6296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-march-april-2015","tag-march-april-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}