I always had my doubts about Graham Greene. In fact I remember writing an essay for a Catholic literary magazine while I was in college, questioning his orthodoxy.
The Power and the Glory is certainly a fascinating book, but there is something not quite right in all of Greene’s work, IMHO.
As a boy, he was always looking for a way to be out of step with everyone else—the impulse to be perversely different. In his early years he found it in Catholicism, which was the great bugaboo of the English. I think he loved the idea of offending people. Later he found it in Communism, at least that’s my reading of The Ugly American and later work.
Graham Greene was a professional bad boy. Like most bad boys, he wanted (a) somebody to tell him the right thing to do and (b) to defy that person. He lived a somewhat irregular life when he was a Catholic, but probably planned to make it all right on his deathbed...
There are probably many people like him out there. The Church has always (although not enthusiastically) had a place for people like him. And he did have moments that were glorious - when the Comandante is drinking the wine that the failed priest in “The Power and the Glory” wanted to save for celebration of the Mass, and the priest sees “all the hope of the world draining away.” I don’t remember the specific words and don’t have the book here, so this may not be an exact quote.
But Graham Greene was a wonderful writer, although I think that oddly enough - or maybe not - his powers declined after he left the Church.