Greene on His "Priest"

This is an excerpt from Greene's book The Ways of Escape (pg. 65-68), telling about how he discovered his "whiskey priest" from The Power and the Glory.

So it was that the doctor put me on the track of Father Jose in my novel… "I asked about the priest in Chiapas who had fled. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘he was just what we call a whisky priest.’ He had taken one of his sons to be baptized, but the priest was drunk and would insist on naming the child Brigitta. ‘He was little loss, poor man.’"

(Speaking about reading The Power and the Glory) "As I read on I encounter more and more characters whom I have forgotten, who beckon to me from the pages and say ironically, "And did you really believe you had invented me?"

But I had always, even when I was a schoolboy, listened with impatience to the scandalous stories of tourists concerning the priests they had encountered in remote Latin villages (this priest had a mistress, another was constantly drunk), for I had been adequately taught in my Protestant history books what Catholics believed; I could distinguish even then between the man and his office. Now, many years later, as a Catholic in Mexico, I read and listened to stories of corruption which were said to have justified the persecution of the Church under Calles and under his successor and rival Cardenas, but I had also observed for myself how courage and the sense of responsibility had revived with persecution – I had seen the devotion of peasants praying in the priestless churches and I had attended Masses in upper rooms where the sanctus bell could not sound for fear of the police. I had not found the idealism or integrity of the lieutenant of The Power and the Glory among the police and pisteleros I had actually encountered – I had to invent him as a counter to the failed priest: the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives: the drunken priest who continued to pass life on.