The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory is a 1940 novel by the British writer Graham Greene. Its title comes from the doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer, and it is set in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s, when the state was suppressing the Catholic church.

The protagonist is a priest who has been living on the run, drinking and fathering a child, and who is the last clergyman in the region still free. He moves from village to village, and the novel gives equal space to the lieutenant hunting him, so neither man is simply a villain. The pursuit is slow and the countryside is hot and empty, much of the book is the priest's own memory of what he has done, and its central scene is a confession he cannot bring himself to refuse.

Greene travelled in Mexico before writing the novel and based the setting on what he saw there. It is one of the books he called his Catholic novels, alongside Brighton Rock and The End of the Affair, and it is often named as his best.