![]() In persecuting Rodrigues, the Japanese authorities are cunning in making him witness the horrific physical suffering of Japanese Christian converts. What, then, is Endo trying to say about the silent Christ who passes by at the moment of the martyr’s death? Is Silence a simple story of decline and fall, or does Endo find a deeper mystery in Rodrigues’ apostasy? The scene of Endo’s novel, however, is 17th-century Japan rather than China, and his missionaries young Portuguese Jesuits who set out to keep the light of Christianity burning in a country which, after initially embracing Christianity through the efforts of Saint Francis Xavier, now has outlawed it.īut a more substantial difference between Sister Marie de Saint-Nathalie and the protagonist of Endo’s tale, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, is that Rodrigues chooses, in a moment of great anguish, to trample on the fumie, a bronze image of Christ, and thus renounce his faith. This silence of Jesus who passes by at the moment of persecution is the theme of Shusaku Endo’s elegantly written, gripping, and much-acclaimed 1966 novel, Silence (a film adaptation of which, directed by Martin Scorsese, will appear in 2015). Sister Marie de Sainte-Nathalie, a Franciscan Missionary of Mary who was beheaded with her companions in 1899, was heard to say in going to her death: “Do not be afraid. This past Wednesday, July 9, was the Feast of Saint Augustine Zhao and Companions, a group of 120 Christian priests, nuns, seminarians, and lay people martyred in China from 1648 to 1930.
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