One reviewer doesn’t want to “betray” the plot for his readers another declared that “it would be unfair to reveal the decision” that Rodrigues, in the end, makes - having been told that if he tramples on the fumie, which is an icon expressly fashioned for such a gesture, others in the midst of terrible torture will be spared. Rodrigues, caught by the Church’s persecutors, is confronted with their demand that he defile a holy image of Christ, and thereby add his apostasy to that of the one whose actions he has come to investigate. It is interesting, in this regard, how Silence has been reviewed: Critic after critic, extolling the book, refuses to divulge its climactic moment - when Fr. ![]() Rodrigues, and by the time we readers learn about what happened, we are more than a bit stunned. Ferreira’s apostasy is probed, all right, by Fr. Rodrigues had to wait and wait for approval for his proposed mission of inquiry - and in fact the book hints at a possible explanation for such a reluctance: Fr. Indeed, Endo more than implies that the Church itself was not easily inclined to look into the matter of Fr. ![]() Rodrigues (it is declared a part of Catholic missionary history) which chronicles the extreme suffering of persecuted believers, not to mention the spiritual tests and trials put to the man whose words are a record, obviously, an account of a story, but something else, too - a challenge to us: What does Jesus ask of us, expect from us, in our daily lives?Įndo’s disarmingly direct and poignant narration masks a complex moral discussion that many of us, perhaps, will prefer not to join. ![]() Rodrigues and another Jesuit, Francisco Garrpe, eventually get to Japan (the year is 1638), and the heart of the novel is a letter written by Fr. The novel’s central character is a Portuguese Jesuit, Sebastian Rodrigues, and what we read is an account of this young missionary priest’s experiences in Japan, where he has gone in order to learn the whereabouts, the fate, of another Jesuit, Christovao Ferreira, who is reported to have apostatized after a long career in Asia, much to the disbelief of his fellow Jesuits in Rome and elsewhere. Thirty years ago the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo published Silence, a novel meant to tell the story of missionaries in 17th-century Japan, whose efforts were subject to fierce repression, through a story that concretely examines nothing less than the nature of faith, of loyalty under extreme duress to Jesus and His Church, and therefore of martyrdom.
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