A Jesuit priest and professor of English literature finds a surprising convergence between one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and the latest successor of St Peter

In a letter written in 1991, shortly before his death, Graham Greene expressed his affection for the Society of Jesus: “Really, the only link I feel I have with the Catholic Church is with the Jesuit order.” Were Greene alive today, he would be surprised to see that link to his faith coming not from the margins of the Church but from its centre, in the Chair of St Peter.

I wonder what Greene would have thought, given his own turbulent relationship with the faith, of the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s favourite metaphor for the Church: “I see it as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high ­cholesterol or if his blood sugar is at the correct level. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds … start from the ground up.” The Church as field hospital: it’s a metaphor that resonates with Greene’s sense of the place of the Catholic Church in the middle of the upheavals of late modernity.