The Power and the Glory

"... a man must retain some sentimental relics if he is to live at all" (90). With this line, the whisky priest officially takes on his Judas in the mestizo. He knows he will be betrayed eventually after tripping the mestizo up in lies and inconsistencies in his story. (I didn't realize it at first, but even the trip on the mules brings up the Biblical allusion to Jesus entering Jerusalem on a mule on Palm Sunday.) This whisky priest has been stripped of all his priestly vestments and sacramentals and holds onto to this lump of paper slowly decaying through the sweat and rain of his arduous trip. The tragic hook in all of this is he knows he cannot trust the mestizo and yet he follows him to his doomed meeting with the lieutenant, his Pontius Pilate. As a text-text correlation, this follows the Biblical Passion of Christ almost scene-by-scene. I also see the sentimentality getting stripped from him as he arrives at a true and authentic faith that he lacked most of his life. This transformation of the whisky priest is what converts Luis at the end of the novel when he opens the door to shelter the new priest (and lone representative of God) in this nihilistic world with no meaning.