In his long and celebrated literary career—which I began to examine in the last issue of The New Criterion—Graham Greene has written some three dozen novels, “entertainments,” plays, essays, memoirs, short-story collections, and travel books.¹ But it is those books which, for want of a better term, we may call his Catholic novels (The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and A Burnt-Out Case) and his later political novels (The Quiet American, The Comedians, The Honorary Consul, and The Human Factor) that are generally acknowledged, for better or worse, to comprise the nucleus of his oeuvre. Though there are other works by Greene that have scattered and enthusiastic support, critics who speak of Greene’s literary mastery tend almost exclusively to cite some or all of the books on this list as evidence of that mastery; and it is the Catholic novels that are mentioned most frequently of all. This being the case, it seems necessary to devote special attention to those books, and to ask certain questions in connection with them, namely: How did Greene come to Catholicism? In what form did Catholicism, in turn, come to enter his work? What does religious faith mean to him, and what role does it play in his fiction?

Considering that Graham Greene is one of the world’s most respected Catholic writers, the story of his introduction to the Roman Catholic