The Good in Evil

The only other admirable character in Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory aside from the Whiskey Priest is the character who is trying to bring in the priest, the Lieutenant.

The Evil I am talking about is the establishment. No I'm not trying to be a hippy or anarchist, though both of those options have presented themselves to me as interesting alternatives. No, I mean the political movement that presents the lieutenant with the tools and the authority to go around, killing innocent people to round up people who may or may not be bad. It's the intense hatred of the catholic church that the lieutenant has that makes him the cold man whose entire purpose in life is to kill the last remaining priest in Mexico.

However, the biggest change in the novel comes not from the main character, but in a secondary character that is trying to kill him. He and the whiskey priest are nearly mirror images at the beginning of the novel, then they seem to almost switch roles. The Priest is cowardly and focused on nothing but himself. He seems to care not for the people that he meets and he constantly seeks a way to save himself. He is an almost disgusting human being towards the beginning of the novel. However, The Lieutenant is also revolting. With his maddening loyalty to a political party that he believes in without thinking, and with his near selflessness in that he wants to kill the Priest not for glory or fame, but for a better world for Mexico.

However, the change wrought in both almost (But not quite) Switches the characters. The Priest gets the Lieutenants selflessness and goes out of his way and at his own peril to help a man that he doesn't know. And even through his nervousness and his self preservation telling him to leave, he stays with the dying man. The Lieutenant does not become cowardly, but he loses his sense of unquestionable loyalty to his politics. He questions whether the whiskey priest was evil and what he should do now. He gains the Whiskey Priest's sense of loss and sense of direction. The fact that the Priest isn't a monster like he thought rocks his world, causing him to question perhaps other lies the politics he listened to told him to do an think. Perhaps the Lieutenant becomes the Whiskey Priests replacement, a continuation of the character lead off to his death at the end of the book.