At its core, sin in The Power and the Glory is portrayed as a universal human condition, inherent in every individual regardless of their social status or profession. The whisky priest, a flawed and morally conflicted character, embodies this notion as he grapples with his own sins while striving to fulfill his religious duties, which often involve forgiving the sins of others. Because the whisky priest is a sinful man himself, he does his best never to judge others, regardless of how poorly they treat him. This attitude is demonstrated in his interactions with the mestizo, who repeatedly lies and attempts to betray the whisky priest. Although the whisky priest sees right through the man’s fabrications—which, had he not, would result in the whisky priest’s death—he chooses to forgive rather than judge. In the whisky priest’s eyes, it is God’s duty to judge, while it is the priest’s duty to forgive. A similar example occurs when the whisky priest is in jail and he hears a couple having sex in the dark. Another prisoner hears the couple and calls their sex sinful and ugly. However, the priest contradicts her and insists that sin can be beautiful. His assertion suggests that humans often sin not because they desire to be bad, but because they have positive emotions and experiences through sinning. While the whisky priest does not think this is an excuse for immoral behavior, it helps him understand his fellow human beings, as well as himself.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Nature of Sin ThemeTracker
The Nature of Sin Quotes in The Power and the Glory
Far back inside the darkness the mules plodded on. The effect of the brandy had long ago worn off, and the man bore in his brain along the marshy tract-which, when the rains came, would be quite impassable-the sound of the General Obregon's siren. He knew what it meant: the ship had kept to time-table: he was abandoned. He felt an unwilling hatred of the child ahead of him and the sick woman-he was unworthy of what he carried. A smell of damp came up all round him; it was as if this part of the world had never been dried in the flame when the world was sent spinning off into space: it had absorbed only the mist and cloud of those awful spaces. He began to pray, bouncing up and down to the lurching, slithering mules stride, with his brandied tongue: “Let me be caught soon…Let me be caught.”
“I'm breaking the law enough for you as it is,” Captain Fellows said. He strode out of the barn, feeling twice the size, leaving the small bowed figure in the darkness among the bananas. Coral locked the door and followed him. "What a religion!" Captain Fellows said. “Begging for brandy. Shameless.”
He was a bad priest, he knew it: they had a word for his kind—a whisky priest—but every failure dropped out of sight and out of mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret—the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart.
“In the lamplight Padre José’s face wore an expression of hatred. He said: "Why come to me? Why should you think? I'll call the police if you don't go. You know what sort of a man I am.”
He pleaded gently: “You're a good man, José. I've always known that.”
“He said: "They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It was their duty to teach-well, love.”
“You don't know what's right. The priests know.”
He said after a moment's hesitation, very distinctly: "I am a priest.”
The brandy was musty on the tongue with his own corruption. God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? He remembered the woman in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency: it seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved: 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.
He could hear the half-caste panting after him: his wind was bad: they had probably let him have far too much beer in the capital, and the priest thought, with an odd touch of contemptuous affection, of how much had happened to them both since that first encounter in a village of which he didn't even know the name: the half-caste lying there in the hot noonday rocking his hammock with one naked yellow toe. If he had been asleep at that moment, this wouldn't have happened. It was really shocking bad luck for the poor devil that he was to be burdened with a sin of such magnitude.
