Sarah E. Moffett

One has a lot of hours to kill when crossing the pond. Particularly if one is crossing the pond via American Airlines, who decides showing Young Frankenstein qualifies for quality entertainment. Out came the paperback, Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote.

Considering the joy the Greene’s Man Within brought me, I was ready for Greene to redeem himself. Instead, I was the one that ended up evangelized, saved, and baptized. He is that good in this book.

Enter Father Quixote, the small town priest with the same depth as Greene’s The Power and the Glory lost-cause- whiskey priest, but with more simplicity and ignorance. As the narrator notes on page one, “so many of his prayers had remained unanswered. That he had hopes that this one prayer of his had lodged all the time like wax in the eternal ear.” Father Quixote scores the title Monsignor after assisting a high ranking church official, who imbibes over lunch with the Sunday School wisdom that “no wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.”

The unwanted elevation in title causes jealousy from a local bishop and serves as the impetus to propel Monsignor Quixote off on a set of wacky adventures via his faithful steed, err, car named…you got it…Rocinante. He is joined by the inevitable comrade, obviously named Sancho, who is played by a communist ex-mayor that keeps Monsignor in all kinds of a mental quandary, as he notes various observations regarding the Catholic church. “It’s funny, isn’t it, but the church can alter its mind about what concerns money much more easily than it can about what concerns sex?”

In sum, Monsignor Quixote is a brilliant parable and literary allegory. Sprinkled with occasional advice such as “cars, like women, should never be spoilt” and “there was virtue in the slowness we had lost,” it seamlessly moves from theologically probing to highly entertaining. Produced in his later years, Greene’s developed genius is rampant and flawless in every line. It smacks of brilliance as a modern parody on Don Quixote coupled with an amusing analogy between communism and Catholicism.

On a personal writer’s note, it also tells the story of my own high school and early college experiences. Like Monsignor Quixote’s unexpected benefactor said, “holiness and literary appreciation don’t always go together.” Then again, they certainly do in this book.

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