One of the writers who got me started on this blog is Graham Greene, who called the protagonist of The Power and the Glory, one of the 20th Century's best English-language meditations on faith, a "Whisky Priest".
What the hell is a Whisky Priest? What does that mean?
On the one hand, the answer is obvious ("It's a priest who likes whiskey, duh!"); but on the other it seems like there's a lot more to explore there. Why isn't he just called a drunk? Or a sinner? Is he just a no-good priest, or is there some virtue in his whiskeyness? Questions like that are part of what I'm essaying to answer at Theology of the Bottle.
So I have to share this article from The Atlantic on Graham Greene's dossier at the Vatican, which I read in hard copy years and years ago but just remembered and dug up for y'all.
It's not surprising that Rome's censors worried about Greene's "'Immoral' or married priests; the ambiguity with which the central figure refers to God and the doctrines of the faith; the conviction or the virtue attributed to Protestants and atheists”. Nor is it surprising that, according to the article's author, some Vatican authorities were "Defensive about their authority (which they desired to assert even as they doubted its efficacy), and incapable of grasping the conceptual problems posed by Greene's writing,…”
But the most interesting nugget from this report is a quick glimpse of the man who would become Pope (now Pope Emeritus) Benedict XVI. The Atlantic reports:
“The records of censorial investigations undertaken after the death of Leo XIII, in 1903, are in the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and are not available to be consulted by outside scholars. In February of last year I sought and obtained an audience with the Congregation's prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. To my request that an exception be made to the rules, the reply was one word, uttered without hesitation: 'Ja'."
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