Converts: Graham Greene’s Fraught Relationship with the Confessional
Graham Greene became a Catholic because of a pedantic girl. He was at Oxford at the time, and had written a review of a film for the Oxford Chronicle in which he had referred casually to Catholics’ “worship” of the Virgin Mary. Shortly afterwards he found a note in his college pigeonhole. It was from Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a young Catholic woman, a publisher’s secretary, who had been irritated by the reference: the correct term for the veneration of Catholics for the Virgin Mary was, she said, “hyperdulia.” Greene was intrigued and invited her to tea; almost at once he fell in love.
When he had finally persuaded her to marry him—to help his case he offered (briefly) a sexless marriage—he began investigating her faith. She had become a Catholic against her mother’s wishes when she was fifteen or sixteen. Greene began his exploration of the Church because of her, but wrote in one letter: “I do all the same feel I want to be a Catholic now, even a little apart from you. One does want fearfully hard for something firm & hard & certain, however uncomfortable, to catch hold of in the general flux.” It was characteristic of the age.
He turned up at the dingy presbytery of Nottingham Cathedral—he was then, after Oxford, working as a journalist on the local paper—and left a note saying he was interested in learning about Catholicism. The priest with whom he was put in touch, Fr George Trollope, cathedral administrator, was an unusual man, a convert himself and a former actor, though the only indication of his previous life was the number of plays among his books. Greene was unimpressed initially by Fr Trollope, but was won over by what he described as his unaccountable goodness.
Greene began to take instruction in the faith, which took place in unprepossessing circumstances. They would, he recalled, discuss “the date of the Gospels on the upper deck of a tram swaying out to some Nottingham suburb where he had business to do and concluded it with the significance of Josephus in the pious pitch-pine parlour of a convent.” He did not disclose the reason for his enquiries, and as the instruction progressed it became a larger matter than Vivien:
The date of the Gospels, the historical evidence for the man Jesus Christ: these were interesting subjects which came nowhere near the core of my disbelief. I didn’t disbelieve in Christ; I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced of even the remote possibility of a supreme, omniscient, omnipotent power I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of a hard dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It was like a fight for personal survival.
Greene had grown up as an Anglican and on at least one occasion as a child he had felt the presence of God vividly, but we can reasonably take his word that he had lost God by the time of his instruction. Yet in courting Vivien, he had not presented himself as an atheist. Looking back on his reception into the Church later in life when he wrote the memoir A Sort of Life, he felt nostalgic for his old certainties. He recalled the story of his friend the novelist Antonia White, who had met an old priest at her father’s funeral who urged her to return to the Church. Remind me, she said, of the arguments for the existence of God? “After a long hesitation he admitted to her, ‘I knew them once, but I have forgotten them.’ I [Greene] have suffered from the same loss of memory.”
What Greene meant was the painstaking, logical approach to apologetics of Fr Trollope that was part of every priest’s training prior to the Second Vatican Council.
Writing many years later, Greene felt wistful in recalling his former certainty when he was first received into the Church. He was not at all elevated by any sense of the numinous let alone any personal exhilaration when it happened, in February 1926, on a dark afternoon, with the only witness a woman who had been dusting the chairs: “I remember very clearly the nature of my emotion as I walked away from the Cathedral: there was no joy in it at all, only a somber apprehension.” He had first to undergo the ordeal of confessing his sins: “The first General Confession which precedes conditional baptism and which covers the whole of a man’s previous life, is a humiliating ordeal. Later we may become hardened to the formulas of confession and skeptical about ourselves . . . But in a first Confession a convert really believes his own promises.”
He was to encounter the inflexible aspect of the moral teaching of the Church soon afterwards. Before his marriage a doctor gave him a false and devastating diagnosis of epilepsy. The condition was then thought to be chronic and hereditable, and it presented Greene with a choice: either he must risk having an afflicted child or use contraception or abjure sex. He took his dilemma to a priest at Brompton Oratory, Fr Talbot, and they discussed the matter in a taxi crossing and recrossing the rectangle between Bayswater Road and Brompton Road. He expostulated to the priest, who declined to countenance artificial birth control: “Do you expect married people to live together without making love?” Greene asked. “The Church expects you to trust God, that’s all,” Fr Talbot replied.
Greene, in a way, respected him. “There was no failure in comprehension. Father Talbot was a man of the greatest human sympathy, but he had no solution for me at all. There was only one answer he could honestly give. It was the Rock of Peter I was aware of in our long drive, and though it repulsed me, I could not help admiring its unyielding façade.”
In the event, his brother, a doctor, had the diagnosis overturned. It is easy to see the attraction of this unyielding faith for Greene as a writer: the stakes in any human action were high . . . one course could, as it was thought, lead to the birth of an afflicted child; another would mean mortal sin. There were consequences from an individual’s choices in one world or another. For a novelist this contrast of real light and shade, the idea that an action could have eternal consequences, were compelling, however practically inconvenient.
Later, he would identify this as a defining difference between his work and that of non-Catholic authors. As his biographer Richard Greene (no relation) wrote,
Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions, . . . Greene saw Mrs Dalloway, for example, not as a novel with realized characters but as a mere “prose poem.” In this view, this was not only an intellectual difference between Woolf’s beliefs and his, but a failure of craft—her characters are defective because ontologically adrift.
Greene’s view of the world, as expressed in his work, was fundamentally altered by his conversion; as Fr Leopoldo Duran, a Spanish priest who became a friend later in his life, observed, “it was his marriage, bound as it was for disaster, which was the cause of Graham becoming . . . the writer who decided to make theology the backbone of virtually everything he wrote.” Greene would later repeatedly and wearily repudiate the suggestion that he was a Catholic writer; indeed, as early as his trip to Mexico in 1937–8 he welcomed being published by Longman, as being less likely than a Catholic imprint to brand him as such. But as Richard Greene says, this feeling was very much more true of the second half of his career than the first. “In the 1930s, Greene was explicitly struggling with the problem of how a Catholic sense of the soul and of providence altered the craft of fiction . . . Greene’s sense of craft is shaped by his faith—the faith and the craft are not separate.”
His initial conversion was, Greene maintained, intellectual—he continued to read books on theology after being received into the Church. And in several of his literary essays, he wrote with the continuing zeal of a convert about the effect of Catholicism on writers, or, in his 1936 essay on Henry James, on the effects of not being a Catholic: “the Anglican Church never gained the least hold on James’s interest, while the Catholic Church seems to have retained its appeal to the end. He never even felt the possibility of choice; it was membership of the Catholic Church or nothing.”
Greene identifies what may have attracted James (like himself) to the Church: “its treatment of supernatural evil.” He went on:
No day passed in a Catholic Church without prayers for deliverance from evil spirits “wandering through the world for the ruin of souls.” This savage elemental belief found an echo in James’s sophisticated mind, to which the evil of the world was very present . . . The novels are only saved from the deepest cynicism by the religious sense . . . human nature is not despicable in Osmond or Densher, for they are both capable of damnation.
Greene would at the end of his life disclaim a belief in Hell, at least in the next life, but this was not his view in the years following his conversion: “both Densher and the Prince have on their faces,” he wrote, “the flush of the flames.”
It was when he (like Evelyn Waugh at almost the same time) came to visit Mexico in 1937–8, in the aftermath of the devastating persecution of the Church by the socialist government, that Catholicism became a matter to engage his emotions, for it was something for which people could suffer and die. Indeed, his sympathies swung in opposite directions at this time: against Catholic Franco in Spain, with the persecuted Catholics of Mexico, and both situations “inextricably involved religion in contemporary life.”
But it was not just the emotional appeal of martyrdom that drew him to the Church in Mexico. It was the supernatural that attracted him to Catholicism. For Greene, the magical aspect of religion was fundamental: the God-man who died on the cross and rose again, the devil who roams the world like a lion, seeking whom he might devour, the guardian angel who kept a soul from harm. It was precisely this unabashed supernaturalism that attracted him to the syncretic religion of Mexico.
Yet the change in his outlook was already under way. Before visiting Mexico he had written about the possibilities of salvation for the damnable Pinkie in Brighton Rock. And even in Brighton, Satan was at large. The old priest tells Rose: “A Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone. I think perhaps—because we believe in Him—we are more in touch with the devil than other people.”
And in Mexico, as he wrote in his later autobiography, Ways of Escape, “I began to examine more closely the effect of faith on action. Catholicism was no longer primarily symbolic, a ceremony at an altar . . . nor was it a philosophical page in Fr D’Arcy’s Nature of Belief. It was more like death in the afternoon.”
It was in Mexico in the ruins of the persecuted church “that I discovered some emotional belief.” But he was correcting proofs of Brighton Rock at the same time, and reflected that “something must have been astir before that, or how was it that a book I had intended as a simple detective story should have involved a discussion, too obvious and open for a novel, of the distinction between good-and-evil and right-and-wrong and the mystery of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’—a mystery that was to be the subject of three more of my novels.”
The next of those Catholic novels, a very different work from Brighton Rock, was The Power and the Glory, published in 1940.
Most of the characters in that novel other than the upright police lieutenant had been provided by real life, and Greene later recognized them in rereading his account of his travels in Mexico, The Lawless Roads. The situation itself needed no invention—“I had seen the devotion of peasants praying in priestless churches and had attended masses in upper rooms where the Sanctus bell could not sound for fear of the police.” The whisky priest was already at large: an unfortunate cleric who, under the influence of drink, insisted on baptizing a baby boy as Brigitta.
Greene was not scandalized by this shabby, sinful cleric; as a Protestant schoolboy he had never been impressed by travelers’ stories of village priests with mistresses, intended as proof of the corruption of Rome.
Yet the whisky priest and his sexual lapses and a brief description of fornication in a darkened crowded room did cause scandal; ten years after the novel was published in 1940, Cardinal Griffin, archbishop of Westminster, read Greene a letter in which the Holy Office (the later incarnation of the Inquisition) condemned it as “paradoxical” and dealing “with extraordinary circumstances.” Greene refused to amend the novel on the ground that the copyright was dispersed among various publishers, and the matter was allowed to drop.
Years later, when he met Pope Paul VI, he told him about the condemnation. The pope replied, “Some parts of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that”—advice that, as Greene observed, he had no difficulty in following.
In the war, with the ever-present possibility of death in London during the Blitz, he was to observe the working of grace in improbable situations:
A young priest . . . was called to a wrecked public house where the landlord, his wife and daughter, all Catholics, were trapped. He cleared the way to a billiard table, got under it, and was then near enough to them to hear their confessions. A voice above his head suddenly asked, “Who’s that?” and he heard himself making the odd statement, “I am a Catholic priest and I am under the billiard table hearing confessions.” “Stay where you are a moment, Father,” the voice said, “and hear mine too.” It was a rescue-party man.
By the time the war broke out, Greene was already visiting prostitutes, and during the war he had a mistress, Dorothy Glover, who was later to become a Catholic. He was, then, faced with the difficulty he was later to identify with painful clarity in the character of Scobie in The Heart of the Matter that a Catholic should not receive Communion unless he is in a state of grace and free of grave sin, and if he has not only committed adultery but has every intention of committing it again, it is difficult for him to resolve matters by simply going to confession. For it is a condition of absolution in confession that there should be a firm desire of amendment on the part of the penitent.
For Greene, it was a dilemma he never satisfactorily resolved, at least until the last years of his life, and it was to keep him from confession and taking Communion—though not from attending Mass—for a long time. He had this in common with the reclusive writer in his short story from 1960, “A Visit to Morin”: “For twenty years I have been without the sacraments and I can see the effect. The wafer must be more than wafer.”
One of his most serious love affairs was with the beautiful and vivacious American Catherine Walston, which began after the war. Their relationship came about through the Church; she was drawn to Catholicism by her friendship with John Rothenstein, director of the Tate gallery, and his wife, Elizabeth—particularly by Elizabeth’s insistence that the truth cannot change over time—and it was she who suggested to Greene that he should be Catherine’s godfather, since she had been influenced by The Power and the Glory (in the event, it was to be poor Vivien who represented him at the baptism).
Both converts took their religion seriously, in their own idiosyncratic fashion—a standing joke at the time was that they took their pleasures behind every high altar in Europe, in which case discomfort must have accompanied the thrill of the subversive. Catherine had affairs with other men, including priests, the most destructive being her sexual involvement with their mutual friend, the Dominican Fr Thomas Gilbey. Greene tried to persuade her to leave her husband, Harry, and marry him, with the inducement that they might together join Catholic Action, an association of lay Catholics. He established that she would have a good case for the annulment of her marriage, which would allow her to remarry. Indeed, they went through a form of marriage in a church in Tunbridge Wells.
In April 1950, Greene wrote to her that he had gone to confession and told the priest about their situation. The priest had replied that if he wished for absolution he must stop seeing Catherine and go back to his wife. “I’m sorry,” Greene had replied. “I’m afraid I must find another confessor.”
The situation was hardly easy for Catherine Walston either. When she and Greene visited Evelyn Waugh, it seems she wrote to him in advance to ask whether he minded accommodating their irregular relationship, for Waugh replied: “Please believe that I am far too depressed by my own odious, if unromantic, sins to have any concern for other people’s. For me, it would be a delight to welcome you here.”
Later Greene’s priest friend Fr Leopoldo Duran was to comment that “Graham was not made for marriage . . . [he] lacked the necessary temperament to endure the unbreakable bonds of a Catholic marriage,” which is to say that Graham’s marriage could have been annulled because he was simply incapable of being faithful to his wife. But for a long time the tension between the practice of the faith and his sexual relationships, especially long-term affairs, meant that it was a tortuous business for him to go to confession and to receive Communion—the sacramental channels of grace. Indeed, Jocelyn Rickards, an artist and another of Greene’s mistresses, recalled a conversation in which Greene was asked, point blank, whether he was in a state of grace. “He paused a long time before saying, ‘No.’”
And that absence from the sacraments eventually had its effect on him: it distanced him from the Church. In A Sort of Life, he recalled the seriousness of his first confession with a kind of wistfulness: “Later we may become hardened to the formulas of confession and skeptical about ourselves; we may only half intend to keep the promises we make, until continual failure or the circumstances of our private life finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens.”
Graham Greene was later to make much of the virtue of doubt, but what was striking was that for so long he was robustly orthodox in his religion. In 1951, for instance, when his affair with Catherine Walston was still intense, he wrote an essay on “Our Lady and Her Assumption” which was striking for its unaffected piety, its defense of the dogma that the body of the Virgin was taken into Heaven, and its sympathy for simple people’s visions of the Virgin: “Since the defeat of the Turks at Lepanto the battle for Christianity has never been more critical, and sometimes it seems as though the supernatural were gathering its forces for our support, and whom should we expect in the vanguard but Our Lady? For the attack on the Son has always come through the Mother. She is the keystone of Christian doctrine.”
There was one observer who could read Greene in the light of his faith, and that was Evelyn Waugh, who admired him more than almost any other contemporary writer. They had been near-contemporaries at Oxford, and were friends, and Greene wrote a moving account of Waugh in his later autobiography.
Waugh observed that “Greene’s ‘Novels’ have been baptized, held deep under the waters of life. The author has said, ‘These characters are not my creation, but God’s. They have an eternal destiny . . . They are souls whom Christ died to save.’”
However, he had doubts about The Heart of the Matter, in which Greene created what looked like a textbook case of a damned soul. It was Scobie, a Catholic who commits suicide, the ultimate sin of despair, yet he does so for apparently altruistic motives, and his damnation is open to doubt (Scobie’s last words are, “God, I love . . .”). At the outset of the novel Greene quotes Charles Péguy, the French poet, and another convert, or revert, that “The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint.”
It sounded portentous, but Waugh cut through this mystical ambiguity: “the idea of willing my own damnation for the love of God is . . . a mad blasphemy,” he wrote.
In his own review of the novel, and from a very different perspective, George Orwell wrote that in Greene’s world, “Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.” But Orwell had his own snobbishness; he considered that Pinkie and Rose in Brighton Rock, being working class, would hardly have been preoccupied with the problem of damnation at all.
Throughout Greene’s life, he travelled widely, and he brought a Catholic perspective to his travels: his encounters with priests, nuns and bishops, or with other Catholics, colored his perceptions, whether in Sierra Leone or Vietnam or Mexico or Poland or the Congo or Paraguay—even in Cuba, where he discussed the relationship between Catholicism and Communism with Fidel Castro. The Church provided him with useful contacts and an unmatched network: its reach was global. His travels, as in Mexico, gave his religion a breadth that it would have lacked at home, and visiting places where the Church was persecuted enlarged his sympathies.
By contrast, at home he actively disliked the Church’s genteel element; in a review of Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox, he was blistering about his kind of Catholicism—though he observed witheringly that “these priests are as necessary to the Church as the apostles of the darker, poorer, more violent world—the priests I have encountered on the borders of a battlefield in Vietnam . . . or in the dying white world of the Congo.”
There was a different glamor in the darker, threatened, endangered Church he encountered abroad, and this was itself snobbishness in its own way. Indeed, Douglas Jerrold, Greene’s fellow publisher at Eyre & Spottiswoode, felt that Greene’s melodramatic obsession with doubt and failure, “the power and the glory,” meant that he missed the essence of ordinary Catholic life.
In the endangered Church on the margins, Greene encountered Catholicism at times when all the externals were stripped away. In Vietnam, in Phat Diem in 1951, an enclave between Viet Minh rebels and French forces, he found Catholics and Buddhists sheltering in the cathedral with their possessions. A friend of his, a Belgian priest named Willichs, took refuge in the bell tower reading his breviary in the middle of a bombardment. Greene asked him for confession, and Fr Willichs gave him as penance an Our Father and a Hail Mary, about the lightest possible, and handed him a Tintin book, so he would have something to read.
In Kenya, he found a singular aspect to the Mau Mau rebellion: “There was an odd thing about the condemned Mau Mau. Nine out of ten became Catholic in the condemned cell after hope was over. Perhaps it was the personality of one Irish priest who began instructing them as soon as they had been sentenced and spent the last night in the cell with them . . . ‘They die like angels,’ the priest said to me. ‘I don’t often see Europeans die so well.’ This was the Church on the borders of life and death, and it moved him.
As his fame grew, he had relationships with successive women, though he never divorced Vivien. That with Yvonne Cloetta, with whom he spent the last thirty years of his life, became a settled fact. His affairs meant that he could not easily receive the sacraments and, as his short story “A Visit to Morin” suggested, that had its effect, though he continued to attend Mass.
Some of his distaste for religiosity, as distinct from faith, came about from the startling success of The End of the Affair, a Catholic novel about an affair and its aftermath, and one he later wished he had written differently: the miracles attributed to the dead heroine should, he felt, have been more open to the possibility of a non-spiritual cause. (Evelyn Waugh thought that the novel was “almost too emphatically sectarian”). But readers were in no doubt about its message. “At a stroke,” he wrote, “I found myself regarded as a Catholic novelist in England, Europe and America, the last title to which I had ever aspired.”
One result was that he became the reluctant repository of confidences from clerics and religious that should, he felt, have been kept for their confessors. “In the years between The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair I felt myself used and exhausted by the victims of religion. The vision of faith as an untroubled sea was lost forever. It was in those years, I think, that Querry [the man who repudiated religion in A Burnt-Out Case] was born.”
All this cut no ice with Evelyn Waugh, who had made a point of recognizing Greene’s particular vocation in conveying religious truth by improbably sordid means. He was disturbed when he read A Burnt-Out Case, in which the hero, escaping his unwanted global fame as a church architect, takes refuge in a missionary leper colony where he refuses to be associated with religion.
Waugh thought it a “most distressing work” and wrote Greene a personal letter of apology:
I know, of course, how mischievous it is to identify fictional characters with their authors, but, taken in conjunction with your Christmas story [“A Visit to Morin”], this novel makes it plain that you are exasperated by the reputation which has come to you unsought of a “Catholic” writer. I realize that I have some guilt in this matter. Twelve years ago I gave a number of lectures here and in America presumptuously seeking to interpret what I genuinely believed was an apostolic mission in danger of being neglected by people who were shocked by the sexuality of some of your themes . . . I am deeply sorry for the annoyance I helped to cause & pray that it is only annoyance and that the desperate conclusions of Morin and Querry are purely fictional.
Greene was defensive about the suggestion that he had described his own spiritual condition; he had wanted “to give expression to various states or moods of belief or unbelief.” Waugh was not persuaded. “You have given many hints which we refused to recognize. Now you have made a plain repudiation. You will not find so much ‘hostility’ among your former fellowship as the regrets of Browning for his ‘Lost Leader’ . . . I don’t think you can blame people who read the book as a recantation of faith . . . God forbid I should pry into the secrets of your soul. It is simply your public performance which grieves me.”
Greene acknowledged experiencing some of the same “moods” as Querry but pushed back: “If people are so impetuous as to regard this book as a recantation of faith I cannot help it. Perhaps they will be surprised to see me at Mass.”
What he really disliked, he reflected, was the piety of the educated, the established, who seem “to own their Roman Catholic image of God, who cease to look for Him because they have found Him.” Yet he was shocked by Waugh’s reference to “The Lost Leader”; his repudiation of certainty was not as complete as all that. He refused an invitation to meet the saintly friar Padre Pio, who was famous for bearing wounds on his hands like the crucified Christ. At the time, Greene was still involved with Catherine Walston and had no desire for an encounter which might lead to a reformation of his life.
Greene was to find doubt useful as a subject, as faith had been. In Monsignor Quixote, written towards the end of his life, the old priest says, “I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God, but doubt is not treachery . . . Doubt is human. Oh, I want to believe that it is all true—and that want is the only certain thing I feel. I want others to believe too—perhaps some of their belief might rub off on me.”
Interviewers endlessly asked Greene about his faith or lack of it—Greene’s weariness with the subject is evident—and he drew a distinction between belief (which he lacked) and faith (which he had), belief being the rational conviction of the truths of religion; and faith being a kind of stubborn tenacity in holding onto God despite the absence of certainty. In his interview with John Cornwell for The Tablet, his agnosticism was “all too evident.”
He explained his situation in a letter to his friend Fr Leopoldo Duran after the Vatican had condemned two well-known Catholic theologians for their unwillingness to accept the literal truth of the resurrection, and he found himself unexpectedly in sympathy with the authorities:
I am to a certain extent an agnostic Catholic . . . One must distinguish between faith and belief. I have faith, but less and less belief, in the existence of God. I have a continuing faith that I am wrong not to believe and that my lack of belief stems from my own faults and failure in love.
Now paradoxically in the affair of Father Hans Kung and Father Schillebeeckx I find myself grateful to those two priests for reawakening my belief—my belief in the empty tomb and the resurrection, the magic side of the Christian religion if you like.
Later, in 1987, he told Fr Leopoldo, “The trouble is, I don’t believe my unbelief.”
Fr Leopoldo, a spiritual Boswell to Greene’s Johnson, regularly heard his confession and gave him absolution (Greene remarked it lasted about two minutes) and Communion during the last years of his life. Fr Leopoldo was star-struck about Greene, but he would not have given him absolution and Communion lightly. As noted earlier, he felt that Greene was simply incapable of fulfilling the obligations of marriage and so he may have felt Greene’s adulteries were not mortal sins.
He would later, at Greene’s request, come to him when he was dying, to give him absolution, forgiveness of his sins. He was with him as he died.
After his exchanges with Evelyn Waugh about A Burnt-Out Case, Greene wrote to Catherine Walston: “I’ll probably never succeed in getting any further from the Church. It’s like, when one was younger, taking a long walk in the country & at a certain tree or a certain gate or the top of one more hill one stopped & thought ‘Now I must start returning home.’ One probably went on another mile to another hill or another tree, but all the same . . .”
He was to go on quite a few more miles, but he returned in the end.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is an excerpt taken from Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, published by Yale University Press, 2026. Reproduced by permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
