Contrition and absolution in Graham Greene's novel "the power and the glory"

Literature provides an imitation of life. By studying literature, the students can increase their sense of life and sense of language. Also, it helps the students to grow into the broader cultural, philosopic and religious world and to recognize human dreams and struggles in order to develop mature sensitivity for the condition of all living things. Based on the above facts, the writer is interested to take a literary work as her object studied. This literary work is a novel. She chooses a novel to observe because a novel develops full of its elements such as characters, actions and themes. studying the religious topics in a religious novel is important because the students can deepen their spiritual confidence and faith in God. In the thesis, the writer studies the religious topics 'contrition' and 'absolution' in Graham Greene's novel The Power and The Glory. Here the writer observes the major character, the whisky priest, which becomes her focus in studying contrition and absolution. The writer conducts her analysis using the Content Analysis in order to analyze the major character's dialogues and actions. This analysis is meant to answer the statement of the problem which is "Can the whisky priest achieve perfect contrition and so achieve absolution" From analyzing the whisky priest's act of contrition, the writer finds out that he fails in making an effort to achieve a perfect act of contrition as a mean to achieve absolution, because he cannot concentrate himself to feel sorrow for offending God and he also loves the fruit of his sin. However, whether his sins be absolved or not is remained unknown because considering God's mercy to the whisky priest that God used him to spread the faith in Catholic religion disregarding he is a bad priest