Social Concerns

Greene's novel, The Power and the Glory, and his travel book, The Lawless Roads (1939), published in the United States as Another Mexico (1939), were the result of a trip he took to Mexico during 1938 and 1939. The immediate social concerns of the journey and the novel are straightforward: Greene went with the express purpose of investigating the persecution of the Catholic Church in some of the southern Mexican states. The novel tells the story of a fugitive priest, the last in his area, who knows he will be executed if he is captured, but chooses to stay and administer the sacraments to his people (the travels of the priest in the novel parallel Greene's own). It is not surprising that Greene seems sympathetic to the position of the Church: Greene had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. Although his interest in the Church had begun because of his relationship...