Graham Greene, acclaimed as one of the great novelists of the 20th century, was cursed with sensitivity. Frail in health, the British writer chose to go to the peripheries of civilization, seeking extremes in human misery, in his search for deeper meaning. From his travels he wrote articles for the press and recast his experiences into dozens of works of fiction. Following is his ardently Catholic account of one such journey.
In March 1938, at the age of 34, British journalist Graham Greene journeyed to Mexico, a country under Marxist leadership that had outlawed Catholicism. Posing as a student of archaeology, he traveled by steamship to the far southern State of Tabasco, and then went upriver to the Villahermosa, the region’s only city of note. Arriving in the evening, he heard music playing. “It came faintly down the hill to the riverside through the sticky night,” he wrote in his journal. “I followed it to the place. Under the trees of the little plaza young men and women promenaded, the women on the inner circle, the men on the outer …It was like a religious ceremony going on and on…indeed it was the nearest to a religious ceremony you were allowed to get in Tabasco.”
He was in a universe that had no God. The bishop had been expelled twelve years earlier. Private houses were searched for religious emblems, and prison was the penalty for possessing them. He told of a young man who had been incarcerated three days for wearing a cross under his shirt. Every priest was hunted down or shot.” “It’s a fine state over the border,” a woman confided. “They’ve still got churches there. Nobody can go in them, of course, but they are there. Why, I’ve heard that there are priests too in the towns.” But not in the state of Tabasco.
For two decades the state’s governor, Garrido Canabal, backed by red-shirted paramilitaries, had been remaking society. Catholic names of towns were done away with: “San Juan Bautista” became “Villahermosa.” Where once the city’s historic cathedral had stood only an ugly cement playground remained. “We die like dogs,” someone said. Priests were no longer to be found, and religious ceremonies were prohibited at funerals. He learned that there had been a priest near the border in the neighboring province of Chiapas, but the people had asked him to leave because they could not protect him from the police. No loss, Greene was told, he was a “whiskey priest.” Someone had brought him an infant son to be baptized, but the priest was drunk and insisted on naming the baby boy “Brigitta.”
Government repression had been systematic — and diabolical. In one instance, Garrado had arranged for men on horseback to sack a church. They encouraged children to chop up the images in return for little presents of candy. Statues of the saints were torched. “There had been one great golden angel…the villager stood weeping while it burned.” Greene experienced a world of “dreadful lethargy…without Confession, without the Sacraments, the child unbaptized, and the dying man unshriven.” The people were religious at heart, but Catholicism was dying. The only place where Christians symbols could still be found was “in the cemetery on a hill above the town … tombs …crosses and weeping angels.”
After several weeks in Tabasco, he set out for the neighboring State of Chiapas where the violence was said to be less severe. Riding mule back, he climbed the lofty Sierra Madre ridges separating the two regions and came to a spot where “the ground sloped up again to where a grove of tall black crosses stood at all angles like wind-blown trees against the blackened sky. This was the Indian religion – a dark tormented magic cult. Magic yes, but we are too apt to minimize the magic elements in Christianity – the man raised from the dead, the devils cast out, the water turned into wine. The great crosses leaned there in the black and windy solitude….and one thought of the spittle mixed with clay to heal the blind man, the resurrection of the body, the religion of the earth.”
Eventually, Greene reached the Chiapas provincial center of San Cristobal de las Casas. It was like walking into a new morning. Holy Week was beginning and the houses of worship stood with their towers intact and their doors unlocked. “The finest church,” he wrote, “is the old colonial church of Santo Domingo… A long flight of steps down into the square…statues headless where the troops have reached them. But within the church, flowers and white drapery had been set for Easter, the church was spotlessly clean, and the image of “Christ lay dead among flowers.”
Although Masses were still not allowed in the churches, the Eucharist was celebrated: “in an anonymous house in a side-street, a closed door, nothing to mark the presence of God.” One hundred fifty people crowded into the small space, and he supposed that the police had been bribed to stay away. But danger always lurked. When money was scarce such Mass houses were raided, fines imposed on the congregation, and the priest held for ransom. The Sanctus bell was not rung– silence was a relic of earlier days when a police raid might mean death; such a day could easily return at the “whim of some police officer.”
It was then that Graham Green saw what seemed to be a miracle.
“When I came out from Mass,” he wrote, “it was like an invasion. The Indians were pouring in from the mountains, down the long, cobbled street… they came in thousands to see the crucified Christ. In little straw hats with pointed crowns decorated with streamers of ribbon they plodded in, small and stock and black haired…a great green silk hanging hid the empty sanctuary; the altar was covered in flowers and candles. A long train of Indians moved slowly up to the rail carrying …blossoms from the lemon tree… they kissed the feet of Christ, …lit candles and laid the greenery beside the body and touched the wooden thighs with it…. Then they went gently out. Facing the sun climbing the sky, [they] prayed, crossing themselves in an elaborate mosaic, touching the eyes and nose and mouth and chin. It was an odd mixture of fervor, superstition, holiday…”. They prayed in Indian, not in Spanish, and Green wondered “what prayers they had said and what answer they could hope to get in this world of mountains, thunder, and irresponsibility.”
Amidst the poverty and suffering the British writer found himself seized by a longing for God. “To be a saint is the only happiness,” he wrote in his journal. “If one could set one’s ambition at goodness – so that financial worry meant nothing more than tennis, cricket, something on which one had not set one’s heart.” It was a remarkably religious sentiment from a coolly cynical Oxford graduate and convert to Catholicism. The experience was powerfully expressed in Greene’s masterwork, The Power and the Glory. Published two years later, the book told of a tawdry whiskey priest in love with God, convinced of his utter sinfulness, but unwilling to abandon his people even in the face of death.
October 29, 2022