The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940)

The boat that would carry him to safety is at the quay, smoke up, when a child runs to fetch him, his mother dying and calling for a priest. So the whisky priest turns from the river and stays in the state that shoots men like him. Greene gives him no name, only a thirst he cannot master, a daughter he fathered in a village he was meant to serve, and the settled certainty that he is a coward unworthy of the office he cannot lay down. Through jungle and mud, toward a capture he does too little to prevent, the novel presses a single scandalous claim: that grace runs through this ruined man exactly as it would through a saint, that a Mass mumbled half-drunk is no less holy for the shaking hands that lift it. The lieutenant hunting him is the better man by every human measure, a true believer in a country swept clean of God, and Greene loves him too. The worthlessness is the point. The cracked cup pours the same blood.