>>23825310
>Graham Greene: the Patron Saint of the cheap reversals which still strike provincial readers as the essence of profundity. It’s to Greene we owe the flood of poems honoring “Saint Judas” and exploring the moral intricacies of child-murderers. Pinkie, the hero of Greene’s Brighton Rock, is a saint—because he’s cruel, stupid, weak, impotent, and greedy. Now that’s deep. It’s all supposed to have something to do with Catholic doctrine as imagined by Greene, a middle-class Brit who staged his conversion to the hated Church of Rome as the Big Twist in his own biography. Greene knew little and cared less about actual Catholicism. He just wanted a platform from which to launch his low-tech Marilyn-Manson schtick: lurid crucifixes and bloody straightrazors erotically entwined. As a Catholic commissar Greene turned out reams of Church propaganda in bad faith and worse prose. His account of secularized Mexico, The Lawless Roads, is unintentionally hilarious. It taught Paul Theroux (a charlatan too silly to merit his own listing) everything he needed to know about artificial bile as a substitute for actual sensibility. Greene attributes every annoyance in Mexico, from the heat to the slow trains, to the suppression of the Church: “In the acrid smoke from the burnt tortillas; in the evil hiss of the refried beans; in the Satanic wink of the salsa; one could feel the absence of Christ.” You want to grab him and scream like Sam Kinison, “It’s MEXICO, you fuck! They were burning the tortillas when Cortez got there!” When Catholicism grew too respectable Greene moved on to celebrate the traitor Kim Philby, who was clearly a saint because he betrayed hundreds of comrades, many of whom were tortured to death in the cellars of Lubyanka. If that’s not sainthood, what is? One could almost wish that the Catholic deity existed, just to savor the thought of Greene’s posthumous interview with that vindictive martinet. What a change must have come over Greene’s carefully-cultivated mask of weary wisdom as the trapdoor dropped and the denizens of the Pit, wholly uninterested in moral paradoxes, dragged him down.

>>23825365
Don't entirely disagree. To adopt "le Catholic Author" as your persona is a bit cringe. It's like the tradcaths today, who crave identity.

But interms of how he describes Mexico, I don't think his intention was to show that the absence of the church made everything shit, but to enforce the suffering one could expect a Catholic Priest to feel in his native land where the institution he holds most dear has been outlawed. An institution that he honestly believes deserves his soul. I mean, he juxtaposes this with when he describes how the Sheriff feels. Happy that the church has been removed and that the children will grow up free from the corruption and power of the priests, in the same way that he had.Then, we meet the protestants who don't really seem to care much about any of that nonsense and live happily ever after.

It's all really a matter of perspective and Greene does a good job ensuring that the reader has a variety of them. But given the protagonist is supposed to be suffering, well the description of his surroundings unsuprisingly reflect that.