The Power and the Glory

Various predators appears throughout the book, symbolizing the closeness of death. As in the opening epigraph (see above), the police are often compared to dogs or hounds in close pursuit of their prey. At the port, sharks cruise around the docks, cleaning up “the carrion on that side” (7). Most frequently, vultures appear. These creatures feed off the dead carcasses of other animals’ kills. Vultures hover whenever death hovers, as reminders of the stalking certainty of mortality.

A vulture appears on a nearby roof as Padre José walks through the cemetery. He stumbles upon the funeral of a young child and refuses to pray over her; he has broken his vows, and he won’t now break the law. Instead, the image implies, the vultures hover over possible prey. Coral Fellows, the young, capable daughter of the captain with whom the whisky priest is quite taken, goes about her work as “the vultures rose languidly at her approach” (53). These looming scavengers foreshadow Coral’s fate: She’s killed during the hunt for the American fugitive. When the lieutenant attempts to force the villagers to betray the whisky priest, a vulture watches the proceedings. While “death had been postponed” (76), the presence of the vultures indicates that this postponement is temporary. After the priest’s execution, Captain Fellows sees “vultures everywhere” (212), and Mr. Tench watches “the vultures look[ing] down together on the little whitewashed courtyard” (216) where the execution takes place. These harbingers of death populate the novel with their menacing, vigilant presence.

The dissolution of the Catholic Church under the Mexican government’s authority engenders a loss of tradition and comfort that reverberates throughout the community. The intention isn’t merely to replace one source of authority with another, although that is certainly one of the objectives of the government’s new laws; it’s also to erase the memory of the previous authority altogether, supporting the theme of The Power: Government Control and Religious Authority. The absence of memory with regard to the Church is a motif that concerns the whisky priest, and others, throughout the novel. Without the Church, there’s no fantasy of redemption (from the lieutenant’s point of view) and no possibility for salvation (from the whisky priest’s point of view).

From the lieutenant’s perspective, the expunging of religious memory is a liberating concept: “He wanted to destroy everything: to be alone without any memories at all” (25). His experience of the Church has been almost wholly negative; he witnesses the greed of the priests at the expense of the people and attests to their unholy appetites for money and sex. His greatest hope is that “[o]ne day [the people will] forget there ever was a Church here” (56). In that case, the authority that the lieutenant represents—secular, commanding, free of superstition—will triumph.

In contrast, the whisky priest fears these lost memories, as do other characters in the book. For example, Luis’s father, while admittedly not the most devout Catholic, remembers the Church as a place for community and care. His son, however, easily rejects it in favor of the military strength he sees modeled by the lieutenant and his ilk. This concerns his father: He says, “You don’t remember the time when the Church was here” (51), wherein citizens lived without fear of persecution. The whisky priest fears that “[s]oon it would be difficult to remember that life had been any different” (80). In the capital, he witnesses people parading in the plaza, “like a religious ceremony which had lost all meaning” (103). Their absence of memory also implies a loss of salvation; they have only the secular to guide them.