
The Mass for the Half-Hearted
and the Corrupt
by William T. Cavanaugh
The main character in Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory is an unnamed fugitive priest, the last in the Mexican state of Tabasco, where a ban on Catholicism was strictly enforced in the 1930s. The priest moves from town to town, saying Mass for the poor villagers while simultaneously putting their lives in danger for harboring him. The priest himself is no heroic figure, but a deeply flawed “whisky priest,” an alcoholic who had fathered a child by means of a brief and unromantic liaison with a peasant woman in his parish years before. He is well aware of his own sins and lack of faith, and after being captured confesses to himself that refusing to surrender to the authorities was simply an act of pride. The people he ministers to don’t fare much better in the novel; Greene details their vices and writes, “It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”
The priest persists in part because “it was from him too that they took God—in their mouths. When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist.” In one clandestine Mass, the people are impatient for him to finish, for fear of the authorities. But when he begins the consecration,
impatience abruptly died away: everything in time became a routine but this—"Who the day before he suffered took Bread into his holy and venerable hands…” Whoever moved outside on the forest path, there was no movement here—"Hoc est enim Corpus Meum.” He could hear the sigh of breaths released: God was here in the body for the first time in six years. When he raised the Host, he could imagine the faces lifted like famished dogs.
Neither priest nor people are thereby transformed into paragons of the Christian life. But something important has taken place. God was here in body.
I live on the assurance that, despite my own sins and those of others, Jesus will continue showing up in the Eucharist.
One way of reading The Power and the Glory is as a meditation on the Catholic doctrine of ex opere operato, the always relevant idea that God shows up in the sacraments no matter how rotten the minister or the recipients are. Greene himself seems to have seen the novel in this light: in response to a Vatican inquiry into the immorality and ambiguity portrayed in the novel—“Troubling the spirit of calm that should prevail in a Christian”—Greene wrote that his intention was to “oppose the power of the sacraments and the indestructibility of the Church” to merely temporal power. Despite the daunting Latin name, I find ex opere operato of direct and daily importance to my own faith life. I do not go to Mass for edifying homilies, beautiful music, or the solid virtues of the priest and my fellow parishioners. Those things are all welcome when present, and I have the good fortune of finding them in my local parish. But things change, priests get transferred, parishes close, the broader Church in the US is in crisis, and I have no idea what’s coming next. I live on the assurance that, despite my own sins and those of others, Jesus will continue showing up in the Eucharist.
In affirming that God’s presence in the Eucharist is independent of human merit, ex opere operato removes the Eucharist not only from our vices but also from our virtues. In a squalid jail cell inhabited by a couple having sex and a pious woman outraged at the priest’s lack of outrage, the whisky priest discovers “that our sins have so much beauty.” What he can’t abide is sanctimony. “God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety?... salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.” God’s presence in the Eucharist is thwarted neither by our sins nor by our pious attempts to domesticate the strangeness of the Eucharist, the weirdly zombielike way we feed on Christ’s living flesh and blood.
God’s presence in the Eucharist is thwarted neither by our sins nor by our pious attempts to domesticate the strangeness of the Eucharist.
How we live out the Eucharist is, of course, vitally important. Ex opere operato assures us of God’s presence, but not of the fruitfulness of the sacrament in our lives. In that sense, Christ makes himself vulnerable again in the Eucharist, giving his body and blood into the hands of us sinners. But the idea that there is nothing I nor the priest or anyone else can do to keep Christ from showing up in the Eucharist keeps me going back to Mass every Sunday.