aid, "I have only just landed. I came up the river tonight. . . . I am a priest . . . My name is Father---" But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give himself a name (221-222).
Clearly, then, Greene is saying that what the Church is doing---in the persons of its very flawed priests---is a good thing which should and will continue. The idea of a good priest to Greene is not that he should be a saint without flaws, but rather that he should struggle through his own flaws and sins and still manage to carry the Word of God to the people. The Church itself may be corrupt and out of touch with the lives of the peasants in Mexico, says Greene, but it still manages to get the job done through the relentless efforts of these very flawed human beings.
The arrival of the next nameless priest after the execution of the whisky priest lets us know that the work goes on. The fact that the protagonist of the book as well as the priest who arrives at the end of the book are nameless tells us that they are not doing this for their own glory but for the glory of God and the salvation of the people.
When we meet the whisky priest, he is shown to be a man with little apparent authority of any sort. We would not guess from the following description that he would become in the novel a figure of heroic if very human proportions. He has a "round and hollow face charred with a three-days' beard." We are told that the man who turns out to be the whisky priest
stood stiffly in the shade, a small man dressed in a shabby dark city suit, carrying a small attache case. He had a novel under his arm: bits of an amorous scene stuck out, crudely colored. . . . He had protuberant
...