* Graham Greene's 'The Power And The Glory' - making the Catholic faith serious. In his writings Graham Greene has several times put the atheist's view, and usually put it more articulately than most atheists can. And then he has also put the Roman Catholic believer's view. And is this, The Power And The Glory, the book that most makes one type of Catholic faith serious?
The credulous Catholic housewife in the Home Counties, blancmange Catholicism if you will, is all too easy to mock. Ah but what if you place the Catholics in the disgusting horror of Mexico in the 1930s? Catholics suddenly become serious. Their actions and their beliefs take on a seriousness that you can't help take note of and sympathise with. What if you can 'bring alive' Catholics on a village square, heads bowed yet, confronted by the men with the guns who will execute one of them for their silence, who will 'for obscure and superstitious reasons' still not betray the priest standing in their midst?
What if you can then write-in real life complexity and also bring alive the failings of perhaps just these same individual Catholics on the village square? Confront a priest with the dilemma of Catholics pleading with him for a forbidden Official Prayer over one of their children who has died, a prayer that will get him shot: '. . .you can trust us' they plead?' 'But that was the trouble - he could trust no one. As soon as they got back home one or other of them would certainly begin to boast.'
People behaving with an odd bravery when thrown into the one situation, and the very same people behaving with a stupid reckless exuberance when finding themselves in the other? It's very human and perhaps it's very ugly. Well a writer who can do this is not, like most people, simplifying in order to (wrongly) understand the world. He is identifying complication, but a complication, a complex reality, a reader can sympathize with isn't he?
* And even a Greene novel that is far from being a bundle of laughs sometimes contains an aphorism that ought to be poked into the memory mass - 'Any dentist who's worth the name has enemies.'
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