Furthermore, most evidently, the priest is petulant, guilty, and bewildered. He doesn’t know how he’s found himself in this position and just like the priest, many times in our own lives we find ourselves in just the same position. We desire to be an example of the faith that we profess and the devotion to which we aspire to be; however, when we look back on our path filled with the remnants of our shortcomings, we are reminded of our insufficiencies as an image of Christ’s teachings. There is an endless task of striving for perfection, but the priest is not a saint: He is an alcoholic and he spends a lot of time scheming to acquire alcohol, since wine and spirits are illegal in his state, he has fathered an illegitimate child, he’s a hypocrite and when he gives confessions, he tells people to refrain from sins that he is actively committing. It seems that Greene's point, nevertheless, is that purity is not a condition of this world, and is simply not something available to flawed human beings, for complete purity exists only in myths and stories. But who are we to judge? Is the priest’s actions so unacceptable that we engulf ourselves in his own short comings and neglect to recognize our own? We might …show more content…
The reader is constantly reminded that, although we may live a life of sin, God still frees us of our sins. A man full of the knowledge of God “couldn’t believe that anyone anywhere would rid him of his heavy heart” (173) and as the priest speaks to the lieutenant, he proclaims “i don’t know a thing about the mercy of God: I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him” (200), we come to understand that no matter how ugly human actions are, there is still beauty through God’s redemption. Greene provokes Christians to think beyond the traditional ways of thinking about a religious figure for a man who is a sinner can still be an excellent