Graham Greene had a yen for dangerous places, and his search for evidence of the rotten spot of the human heart took him to Vietnam, Africa and, in 1939, to Mexico. The persecution of the church had cooled, but he quickly learned to hate the place, largely because of the hate he saw there. He recalled in The Lawless Roads, that hate is the official teaching, “it has superseded love in the school curriculum.” The product of his visit was The Power and the Glory (1940), a novel about a “whiskey” priest who traveled secretly in the turmoil of the persecution to hear confessions and offer Mass in remote villages where the people would shield him. A Greene hero, he was dependent on liquor and had sired a child in one of the villages, and he was more aware of his weaknesses than of his basic courageous saintliness. Like the young Jesuit Miguel Pro, who went before the firing squad in 1927, he proclaimed “Viva Cristo Rey” as he fell.
Last June at the beginning of the “Fortnight for Freedom,” bishops stoked the fire of resentment against the Obama administration which they had accused of denying freedom of religion to American Catholics. One compared Obama to Hitler and Stalin, another of “strangling” the church. Several, including the bishops of Brooklyn and Newark, touted the new Mexican film “For Greater Glory,” about the Cristero War (1926-29) waged by Catholics against the president Plutarco Elias Calles, who had revived the laws against the church which marked the church-state struggle from 1857 to 1940. Calles closed churches, banned clerical dress, and killed priests; and Catholics, joined by others who hated the government and by those who just like to fight, raised money, got guns and ammunition, and fought back.
Read Full Article »