Silence
by shūsaku endō
foreword by martin scorsese
picador, 256 pages, $16

Silence
a film directed by martin scorsese
paramount, 161 minutes, $19.99

Vincent Shiozuka’s life was a failure. Raised Christian in Japan, he fled to Manila in 1614 to avoid the growing Christian persecution in his native land, only to return in 1636 as a Dominican priest, hoping to preach the Gospel even at the price of martyrdom. He was captured immediately upon his arrival and was sent to Nagasaki to be tortured. Without having preached a single sermon or celebrated a single sacrament for the salvation of his people, he submitted to his interrogators and apostatized.

Stories like this form the backdrop for Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, which follows two idealistic Portuguese Jesuits, Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues and Fr. Francisco Garrpe, as they journey to Japan to discover the fate of their former teacher, Fr. Christóvão Ferreira, a celebrated missionary who is rumored to have apostatized. Japan proves to be rather more than they were expecting. After various struggles with the unromantic face of persecution and martyrdom, Garrpe dies trying to save apostate Christians from death, and Rodrigues chooses to apostatize to save others from torture and death, urged on by the apostate Ferreira to this “greatest act of love.”

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