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SDG Reviews ‘Silence’

At long last Martin Scorsese brings Japanese Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo’s masterpiece about the persecution of Japanese Christians to the screen. It was worth the wait.

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) tells the magistrate and grand inquisitor Inoue (Issey Ogata) in Martin Scorsese’s shattering adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s Silence .

Rodrigues is quoting, of course, the famous boast of the early Christian writer Tertullian, which epitomizes the Christian idealization of martyrdom, so near the center of Christian self-understanding.

This sensibility — often blending piety and defiance, inspiration and bravado, even self-sacrificing devotion and self-promoting PR — was rooted in pre-Christian Jewish memory as well as Christian experience of persecution, first under Jewish authorities and especially under pagan Rome. Above all, of course, it was rooted in the passion and crucifixion of Jesus.

The Christian cultus of martyrdom served Christianity well, not only during the sporadic persecutions of the early centuries, but throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern age. Stories of the early martyrs’ heroic example were both a source of comfort and hope for medieval Catholics and Orthodox living under Islamic rule and a point of pride for the faithful in Christendom.

Then Christianity went to Japan — and in Japan it encountered something new, for which even the rigors of the Diocletian persecution were no true preparation. When 17th-century Japanese authorities in the time of the Tokugawa shogunate found it necessary to send the colonial powers of Europe packing and their European Jesus with them, they didn’t just shatter the missionaries’ bodies. They shattered their narrative.

Endo, one of Japan’s greatest novelists and a Catholic (he has been called a “Japanese Graham Greene,” which is about as useful, and as inexact, as most such analogies), explored this painful history in his 1966 novel Silence , generally regarded as his masterpiece. Scorsese read the book in Japan over a quarter century ago, shortly after finishing The Last Temptation of Christ , and wanted to film it ever since.

While I am (to put it mildly) no fan of Last Temptation , I did note, writing about it 15 years ago, that it was a film I could only imagine a Catholic director making. Now Scorsese has made another intensely Catholic film — one that I find almost as difficult as Last Temptation , but which draws me in as powerfully as Last Temptation repels me.

In a way it draws me in like a sore tooth one can’t stop probing with one’s tongue, like a painful memory that rises unbidden in one’s mind, stubbornly unresolved. Like Of Gods and Men , but much more so, Silence tells no one exactly what they want to hear, except those who can hear nothing else.

It poses a challenge for viewers of any faith or of none, or of any culture or ethnicity, even if the challenge is not the same for everyone. A friend who is an atheist has said that Silence made him want to believe in God. For my part, Silence presses my Christian ethos to the breaking point.

It’s worth remembering that Silence has outraged many Japanese Catholics with its empathic portrayal of persecuted Christians who avoided martyrdom by trampling on fumi‑e (literally “stepping-on picture”) — images of Christ or the Blessed Virgin that suspected Christians were required to step on to express apostasy or repudiation of Christ. Over time the images are worn smooth by countless feet: mute testimony to each believer put to the test of countless past failures. How much difference would one more failure make?

For the Jesuits, the Church’s “shock troops” or special forces, such failure is not an option. When word reaches Father Rodrigues and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) in Portugal that their mentor in Japan, Father Christovao Ferreira (Liam Neeson), has apostatized under torture, they find it inconceivable and set out for Japan to learn the truth.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto paints Japan as a world shrouded in mist and shadow, overgrown with dense forests. The score by husband-and-wife composers Kim Allen Kluge and Kathryn Kluge is a daring ambient skein of breaking waves, insect and bird songs and other natural sounds blended with subtle instrumental effects.

More than once Japan is described as a “swamp,” an environment inhospitable to Roman Catholicism — a plant native to European soil that cannot be successfully transplanted to Japan, where its roots rot.

Rodrigues contests this: Christianity in Japan flourished for generations, he says, before the soil was poisoned by persecution. But what does Rodrigues know about Japanese Christianity? Silence hangs us on the horns of an unsettling dilemma: On the one hand, can a Christianity that is culturally European have meaning in Japan? On the other, if Christianity has changed in Japan, is it still the same faith proclaimed by the missionaries?

The missionaries teach, an interpreter (Tadanobu Asano) dismissively remarks, but will not learn. Their attitude — exemplified by Rodrigues — is that they have the Truth, and the Truth applies everywhere. Rodrigues doesn’t appreciate (as did St. Francis Xavier, who was deeply impressed with Japanese culture) that only a culture not one’s own can teach one to appreciate how profoundly one’s apprehension of truth is shaped and colored by culture, and thus to begin to fathom how differently the same truth would be appropriated by another culture.

Do the Japanese Kirishitans worship the Christian God? How would Rodrigues know? His zeal and piety are earnest and admirable, but his vision is clouded by complacency and arrogance. Perhaps Silence is a true tragedy in the classical sense, in which a virtuous man is undone by a fatal flaw.

Notably, Rodrigues seems initially stronger and more disciplined in his faith than Garupe (Garrpe in the novel), who struggles more with misgivings and failings. “You’re a bad Jesuit,” Rodrigues chides Garupe with a smile. Sometimes, though, weakness proves stronger than strength.

The themes of weakness and betrayal are embodied in the figure of Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), an unhappy wretch whom the priests hire as a guide en route to Japan. A drunk, a coward, a quisling, Kichijiro earns the priests’ mistrust from the outset; he evokes both Judas and Graham Greene’s mestizo in The Power and the Glory , though, unlike both, he repents over and over again.

In time Rodrigues comes to be haunted by Kichijiro’s plight: Had he been born to a Japanese Christian community prior to the current persecution, Kichijiro might have lived out his life a happy, decent Christian. Is it his fault that he was born too late, in an era of unprecedented persecution?

Tertullian’s boast about the blood of martyrs was penned in an era of bread and circuses, in which believers willing to suffer and die for the faith could show the crowds what they were made of. In Japan, by contrast, authorities quickly learned that trying to make dramatic public examples of individual believers backfired. Now they made them suffer ignominiously, away from the public gaze.

“Smite the shepherd,” wrote the prophet Zechariah, “and the sheep will be scattered.” Not only have the Japanese inquisitors learned this lesson, they’ve also learned an insidious inverse principle: To break the shepherd, smite the sheep.

Some are willing to trample the fumi-e to live. Painful as it is, their neighbors understand, and even the authorities seem at times to regard the whole business lightly, as a mere “formality.” But what if trampling the fumi-e is not enough? Rodrigues might be willing to suffer any torture for his faith, but what happens when the cost of his fidelity is the suffering of others?

The climactic moment is much debated, and rightly so. Is it an act of betrayal? An act of self-abnegating love? Both at the same time? Less debatable is what follows. In the end, the question is not whether one has betrayed God, but whether in doing so one has abandoned him entirely, or whether there is still hope of forgiveness.

Like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal , the title suggests the silence of heaven in the face of suffering and evil. This is an important theme, though it’s worth noting that Silence was not Endo’s preferred title, and he later regretted agreeing to the publisher’s suggestion on this point.

What makes the cross-examination of West and East vital onscreen is the depth and complexity of the performances on both sides.

Garfield and Driver both underwent substantial preparation in Ignatian spirituality under the direction of Jesuit Father James Martin, including making a silent retreat, and it pays off. Garfield channels his aura of wholesome sincerity in a direction quite different from his last long-suffering man of faith, Hacksaw Ridge ’s Desmond Doss: intellectual, reflective, sophisticated enough not to realize his limitations.

Next to him, Driver is an ascetic presence (he lost 50 pounds for the role), his sepulchral voice conveying authority and long discipline. Neeson makes the most of what is almost a glorified cameo, particularly in the unbearable reunion scene.

The Japanese actors are possibly even better. As the inquisitor Inoue, Ogata (a comedian as well as an actor) is unnervingly mercurial, a mask of courtliness giving way at times to unexpectedly humorous flamboyance and menacing contempt. Asano’s translator is a friendly, even jovial, sadist. (He’s a less familiar face to Americans than Ken Watanabe, whom he replaced thanks to what now appears to be a happy conflict.)

One of the most haunting scenes belongs to Shinya Tsukamoto as Mokichi, one of the villagers to whom the priests minister in the tense but edifying early going.

Humbled by the villagers’ devotion in extremis , Rodrigues tells Mokichi that their faith gives him strength. “My love for God is strong,” Mokichi haltingly replies. “Could that be the same as faith?” Yes, Rodrigues replies thoughtfully, it must be.

Not long after, Mokichi refuses an apostasy test and is sentenced to a ghastly crucifixion in the surf, slowly overwhelmed by the incoming tide. Toward the end, as villagers and executioners keep a mute vigil, Mokichi raises his voice and sings a plaintive Tantum Ergo (the last two verses of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Eucharistic hymn Pange Lingua ).

In a story of a long defeat, here is a privileged moment of grace. Here, for all with ears to hear, God is not silent.

See also Apostasy and Ambiguity: Silence Asks Hard Questions About Faith and Persecution

Steven D. Greydanus is the Register’s film critic and creator of Decent Films . He is a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter .

Caveat Spectator: Intense scenes of torture and menace, including graphic violence; ambiguous religious themes. Might be fine for mature teens.

• andrew garfield
• japanese martyrs
• liam neeson
• martin scorsese
• persecution of christians
• sdg reviews

Deacon Steven D. Greydanus Deacon Steven D. Greydanus is film critic for the National Catholic Register, creator of Decent Films, a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark, and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. For 10 years he co-hosted the Gabriel Award–winning cable TV show “Reel Faith” for New Evangelization Television. Steven has degrees in media arts and religious studies, and has contributed several entries to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, including “The Church and Film” and a number of filmmaker biographies. He has also written about film for the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy. He has a BFA in Media Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, an MA in Religious Studies from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook, PA, and an MA in Theology from Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ. Steven’s writing for the Register has been recognized many times by the Catholic Press Association Awards, with first-place wins in 2017 and 2016 and second-place wins in 2019 and 2015. Steven and his wife Suzanne have seven children.

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Silence is beautiful, unsettling, and one of the finest religious movies ever made

Martin Scorsese’s film keenly understands Shūsaku Endō’s novel and challenges believer and nonbeliever alike.

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Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence (first published in Japanese in 1966 as Chinmoku , then translated into English in 1969) is slippery and troubling, a book that refuses to behave. It flatters no reader; it refuses to comfort anyone. In telling the story of Portuguese priests and persecuted Christians in Japan, it navigates the tension between missionary and colonizer, East and West, Christianity and Buddhism and political ideology, but refuses to land on definitive answers.

Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating film Silence is based on Endō’s novel, which he read shortly after his 1988 film Last Temptation of Christ was protested and condemned by the Catholic Church and other conservative Christians 28 years ago. It’s almost impossible to capture the nuances of a novel like Endō’s for the screen; Masahiro Shinoda tried in 1971 , and Endō reportedly hated the ending. But Scorsese comes about as close as one can imagine, and the results are challenging for both the faithful and the skeptic.

The struggle for faith in a world marked by suffering and God’s silence is present in every frame of Silence . The answers in Scorsese’s film, as in Endō’s novel, are found not in words, but in the spaces between them.

Silence is a story of persecution in a Japan seeking to expel foreigners

Silence is the story of two young Portuguese Catholic priests, Father Rodrigues ( Andrew Garfield ) and Father Garrpe ( Adam Driver ). They learn from their superior ( Ciarán Hinds ) that their mentor and former confessor Father Ferreira ( Liam Neeson ), who had gone to Japan as a missionary, is reported to have apostatized — that is, repudiated his faith. The rumor is that he’s now living with his wife among the Japanese.

Unable to believe such a thing of Ferreira, Rodrigues and Garrpe beg and eventually are permitted by the church to travel to Japan, where they arrive in 1639 amid a government ban on Christianity. They meet a fisherman named Kichijiro ( Yôsuke Kubozuka ), who agrees to sneak them onto an island near Nagasaki.

The Japanese government’s opposition to Christianity, and the subsequent movement of worshippers to practicing their faith underground, was the result of a complicated set of political factors. Those factors included the influx of Europeans into the country, which the government viewed as a security threat, as well as the Shimabara Rebellion , a revolt of starving peasants against their lords. The persecution of Christians was partly a way to quash the uprising.

On the island to which Kichijiro brings the priests, a group of Kakure Kirishitan (“hidden Christians”) live, practicing their faith in secret to avoid scrutiny from the government — especially Inquisitor Inoue ( Issei Ogata ), who will torture them until they recant. Inoue’s preferred method of ferreting out believers is to force them to trample on a fumie, a simple carved image of Christ. Those who trample, live. Those who refuse are tortured and killed.

Rodrigues and Garrpe live in secret, ministering to the villagers and others nearby. They feel compassion for the people, who live difficult lives of oppression and starvation. But the priests are betrayed by Kichijiro (who is a Judas figure in the story), separated, and brought under Inoue’s scrutiny.

From there the perspective is largely Rodrigues’s, as he witnesses Christians being tortured and is told that if he apostatizes, if he steps on the fumie and repudiates his faith, the others will be spared. But how can he imagine such a thing? And what would it mean for him — a priest, sworn to serve Christ — to choose to do such a thing? As he sees Japanese Christians being tortured, he calls out for answers. But he receives none in return.

Shūsaku Endō’s writing was filtered through his experience as the Other

Endō was Japanese and a Catholic, which meant that no matter where he went, he was an outsider: His Buddhist countrymen viewed him with suspicion for his religion, while the Europeans among whom he lived for years in France considered him a stranger because of his nationality. He was deeply acquainted with the experience of being the Other, and informed the way he understood most everything.

His outlook was further shaped by insights about the links between soul and body he likely gleaned from years of suffering and hospitalization due to recurring bouts of disease in his lungs (at one point, he spent two years in the hospital). For Endō, there are no easy routes to salvation; a person’s body — its ethnicity, its weaknesses, its susceptibility to pain and desire — is as much his link to the life and sufferings of Christ as a person’s soul. (In one of Endō’s novellas , which is at least partly autobiographical, the protagonist is a Japanese scholar of French literature, who is both grappling with faith and studying the Marquis de Sade, for whom sadism is named.)

All of these paradoxes seem to have shaped how Endō thought about the paradoxes of his faith: for instance, the enigma of Christ, who in Christian doctrine is both fully God and fully man. Or the conundrum of Christians being instructed to imitate Christ, while knowing that’s an impossible task for flawed humans. Or the friction between the cultures he strongly identified with, which had to include grappling with both colonialism and oppression.

And as a Catholic, Endō would have believed in the doctrine of Incarnation — that is, the idea that Jesus, the divine Son of God, took on a human body in ancient Israel, during Roman occupation. Jesus lived the life of a carpenter and an itinerant preacher among peasants and villagers, and was eventually executed, his body bruised and pierced, for being a threat to the Roman Empire and the religious leaders who capitulated to it.

So the complexity of entering a culture that is not one’s own was not lost on Endō, and he would see it through the lens of Christ’s experience. But as a person who experienced its pain himself — and as a native of a country marked by colonization — Endō would have complicated feelings about this. People are not Christ. Imitating Christ can mean imitating his incarnation, but nobody can hope to do so without cost, and nobody can do it perfectly. Those complexities surface in Silence .

Scorsese is well-suited to resonate on Endō’s wavelength: a cradle Catholic — he once considered becoming a priest — who has at times been rejected by the church, and a man who is obviously haunted by the connections between body and soul, sin and redemption.

In Silence , Scorsese has found his natural match for plumbing those questions, which he does with considerable restraint. (Readers of Endō’s novel know the descriptions of torture are sickening; in Scorsese’s hands they are more psychologically than visually distressing.) He dives deep, and comes up not with answers so much as an honest suggestion that whenever we think we’ve found the answers, we’ve veered off track. He’s described making the film as a “pilgrimage” of sorts , which denotes both a journey and a struggle, and it shows. Silence is beautifully shot and moving, but it is not what you’d call uplifting. It’s a film that demands reflection, and a rewatch.

To grasp Silence requires seeing it through Rodrigues’s eyes

The strongest, clearest way to understand the story of Silence is through the character of Rodrigues, because his arc hangs on a double thread: that of his role as a European missionary in Japan — what from the 21st century might seem like a “white savior” complex — and that of his place as a priest struggling to understand how to imitate Christ and realizing, slowly, that he can’t, or at least not the way he thought he should.

This relies on recognizing that the story is largely narrated by Rodrigues, and thus shaped by his perceptions. The point at which there’s a noticeable switch in narrators is the film’s inflection point. Everything hinges on that change.

Note: if you want to avoid spoilers, scroll down to the next image .

Silence aims a two-pronged spear right at Rodrigues’s assumptions about his work. He sees himself as a minister to the people of Japan, and so he is: The role of a priest in Catholic doctrine is to embody, in a small way, the intermediary role that Christ plays between the worshipper and God himself. (There’s a moment early on in Silence , when Rodrigues and Garrpe first meet the hidden Christians on the island, in which the hidden Christians explain that in the absence of a priest to administer the sacraments, they’ve come up with a substitute but non-ordained priest, and they wonder if that’s okay. Rodrigues and Garrpe assure them that it is.)

Rodrigues is more flexible in how he applies his understanding of faith to Japanese culture than Garrpe is. When some of his flock ask whether it is okay to trample the fumie to save their own lives, he says it is. But he holds himself, a minister, to a higher standard: It is one thing for the Japanese believer to trample, and another thing entirely for him.

There is some inkling of patronization here (and this is the 1630s, after all). Rodrigues continually speaks of the believers as miserable, suffering, living and dying as beasts; he sees them as human and worthy of salvation, but not exactly as people so much as a mass that needs tending. (For those watching closely, the film is subtly — but perhaps too subtly — critical of this mindset; Rodrigues is no saint.)

But his experience among them is mixed with a strong dose of real belief. Rodrigues is confident, as he tells Inoue in a conversation, that if Christianity cannot be true in every culture than it cannot be true at all. He believes that the good news is good news for everyone, and he is critical of a government that would seek to keep its people from freely worshipping whomever or whatever they wish.

Yet the confrontation of Christianity via Rome with Japanese culture is far more complicated than he imagined. When Rodrigues finally locates Ferreira, the former priest tells him, with sorrow, that Christianity simply cannot take root in Japan, and that there is much truth to be found in Buddhism (the state-mandated religion). This encounter visibly shakes Rodrigues.

The friction between the two — Japanese culture and Christianity — seems to be a lifelong conflict for Rodrigues, even after he finally breaks down and tramples the fumie, saving the Japanese Christians, then remains in the country to live out the rest of his life. He seems broken, his assumptions shattered; when he’s approached to hear a confession years after he leaves the priesthood, he refuses, unwilling to put the supplicant in danger.

Rodrigues’s so-called salvation looks like anything but

But that he does trample the fumie and live out his life in Japan, having publicly repudiated his faith, is both a kind of rebuke and salvation for Rodrigues. In Endō’s novel, and for much of Scorsese’s film, Rodrigues tells his own story in the form of letters, and mimicking that device, the film subtly gives us the story from his point of view. “Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful,” Rodrigues muses after the baptism of a peasant child, whom he characterizes in terms that seem harsh. “The hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt — this is the realization that came home to me acutely at that time.”

It becomes clear that Rodrigues does conceive of himself and his call to imitate Christ as a call to function as a Christ-figure to the people of Japan, suffering and even dying for them if he must. But part of that call requires being the public Christian, the man of God among them. Kichijiro is his Judas, the betrayer, and Inoue is a sort of Satan tempting him with ease and comfort in the midst of his wilderness, just like Christ.

And yet this perception Rodrigues has of himself is complicated by Inoue’s challenge: trample the fumie, and not only will you live easy, but you will save the lives of these others. This is a direct challenge to Rodrigues’s perception of what it means to minister and have faith, one forged in a European context. That the image of Christ calls him to drop his preconceptions rends his heart and challenges him. He must not just repudiate his religious beliefs externally, but also relinquish his own idea of how he’ll serve God, which in turn causes him to wonder whether he is fit to do so at all.

The agony of Rodrigues’s choice to trample the fumie, then, is the agony of letting go of his self-image of faith for another one, an ignominious one in which he will always be the priest who apostatized, no longer the agent of grace and the sacraments to the Japanese. The movie (and the novel) flip to another point of view after Rodrigues’s apostatization, and now we can only see his actions from the outside, rather than experiencing them through the voiceover of his thoughts, agonies, and prayers that we heard before. Rodrigues’s faith, as it were, has become silent. His suffering for Christ isn’t physical, but spiritual: He is questioning whether his faith is faith at all, and whether God is with him even when he seems to be so far away.

But the fumie is an image of the Christ he is meant to imitate, and it is covered in mud, stepped upon by feet, nothing compared to the glorious image he holds in his mind. It’s more in keeping with the Bible’s depiction of Christ (as lowly, crucified in the manner of a thief), but its very kindness in the face of his impending betrayal is enough to break Rodrigues’s heart.

During the film’s telling, climactic moment — when Rodrigues finally tramples on the fumie — you can hear a rooster crow somewhere in the distance. That, of course, is the same thing that happened in the Gospels, when Peter denied Christ before the crucifixion.

Silence challenges the religious and non-religious alike

Since seeing Silence , I’ve been eager to know how others will react to the film. I am a Christian, and Endō’s Silence has been widely read and studied in my community for decades. Even though I’m familiar with the story, I found the film unsettling: The tendency for any religious person is to seek definitive answers for the greatest, most troubling existential questions, and I was confronted with the suffering that can happen on the path to faith, and the doubt that has to be part of that.

But it’s been remarkable to discover that Silence is a challenging film for many critics and early viewers, including those who aren’t interested in religion at all, or who don’t identify with a particular faith. The genius of Endō’s story and Scorsese’s adaptation is that it won’t characterize anyone as a saint, nor will it either fully condone or reject the colonialist impulses, the religious oppression, the apostasy, or the faltering faith of its characters. There is space within the story for every broken attempt to fix the world. Endō’s answer still lies in Christ, but his perception of Christ is radically different from what most people are familiar with — and even those who don’t identify with Christianity will find the film unnerving and haunting.

Silence is the kind of film that cuts at everyone’s self-perceptions, including my own. I haven’t been able to shake it, because I need to remember — now, frankly, more than ever — that I am not able nor responsible to save the world, let alone myself. How the world changes is a giant, cosmic mystery. To grow too far from that and become hardened in my own belief is a danger: I grow complacent and deaf, too willing to push others away.

In Silence , nobody is Christ but Christ himself. Everyone else is a Peter or a Judas, a faltering rejecter, for whom there may be hope anyway. What Scorsese has accomplished in adapting Endō’s novel is a close reminder that the path to redemption lies through suffering, and that it may not be I who must save the world so much as I am the one who needs saving.

Silence opens in limited theaters on December 23 and wide on January 6.

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Fr. James Martin answers 5 common questions about 'Silence'

Martin Scorsese’s new film “Silence,” about 17th-century Jesuit missionaries in Japan, recently opened worldwide. In the days following its release, I’ve been asked many questions by people who know that I served as one of the film’s consultants. Many of the questions were remarkably similar. And these same issues have bedeviled a few reviewers who seem not to have fully grasped some of the film’s significant religious themes. In general, reviewers who seem open to questions of faith have admired the film—some labelling it a masterpiece. Others, apparently less sympathetic to faith in general, have been less enthusiastic.

But even some thoughtful Christian observers seem to have missed a few essential themes. Or they have understood the themes but disagreed with the film’s approach to complicated questions about apostasy and discernment. Here are my answers to some of the most common questions, and misconceptions, about “Silence.”

Needless to say, these are my own perspectives. A work of art is open to multiple interpretations, so others will inevitably disagree. For the record, I’ve discussed many of these issues over the past two years with Mr. Scorsese, his co-screenwriter Jay Cocks, as well as the actors and the creative team. But I don’t speak for them. This is my own take. ( And spoiler alert : I will be discussing several key scenes and the film’s conclusion.)

1.   Why does Father Rodrigues apostatize?

First, a definition: apostasy means the renunciation of one’s faith. In the film, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson) has already been tortured, and, in a cruel twist, the Japanese authorities threatened that if the Jesuit priest did not apostatize, the Japanese Christians among whom he ministered would be tortured and killed. As the viewer knows from the start of the film, Ferreira chose to apostatize rather than see his friends suffer. “Ferreira is lost to us,” says the Jesuit Provincial to Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver). In the film, as in history, many other Jesuits and Japanese Christians are tortured and martyred.

As an aside, this threat—forcing a person to apostatize to prevent others from being tortured or killed—was seldom used on the martyrs. Typically, in Christian history, it is the person himself (or herself) who is tortured and martyred for his or her own beliefs.

Once captured, Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe are confronted with a terrible dilemma: recant their faith and set the Japanese Christians free, or hold onto their faith and let others suffer. It is an almost impossible choice. Thus, both Jesuits are forced to “discern” in a complicated situation where there are no easy answers. Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe come from a world of black-and-white and are both forced to make painful decisions in a world of gray.

Some critics seem to have misunderstood the inherent difficulty of the choice. “Why didn’t they just step on the image of Jesus right away?” one journalist asked me.

This misses a key point. A Jesuit’s entire life is centered on Jesus, whom he knows through the Gospels, through the sacraments, through his ministry and through his prayer, especially through his experience of the Spiritual Exercises, a series of extended meditations on the life of Christ. Father Rodrigues is shown several times speaking aloud to Jesus, praying to Jesus and imagining Jesus’s face. Jesus is central for both real Jesuits and fictional Jesuits. Expecting the Jesuits simply to throw that relationship aside—to apostatize—is wholly unrealistic.

Only in the end, after several searing experiences that include his own physical suffering and witnessing the torture and execution of others, after long periods of agonizing prayer and, in particular, after hearing the voice of Christ in his prayer, does Father Rodrigues apostatize.

He apostatized not simply because he wished to save the lives of the Japanese Christians, but because this is what Christ asked him to do in prayer. Contrary to what some Christian critics have concluded, it is hardly a glorification of apostasy.

Confusing as it seems to some Christian viewers, Christ requests this contradictory act from his priest. It makes little sense to anyone, least of all to Father Rodrigues, who has assiduously resisted it for himself. Yet he does it. Because Jesus has asked him to.

How can we understand that theologically? Perhaps by looking at the experience of Jesus on the cross, as recorded in the Gospels. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus struggles mightily to understand God’s will, and says, “Father if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” He does not wish to die. But then he says, “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Lk 22:42). Jesus does something that everyone in his circle opposes and misunderstands. Even Peter doesn’t want Jesus to suffer: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” (Mt. 16:22).The apostles do not want Jesus to suffer, much less to embrace the cross. It makes no sense to them.

Yet Jesus accepts his fate because this is what the Father asks. His actions make no sense outside of his relationship to the Father. Likewise, Father Rodrigues’s actions make no sense outside of his relationship to Christ. In a sense, there is nothing subtle here: He apostatizes, finally, because Christ asks him to. And for those who say that Christ would never ask something like that, ask yourself how the disciples felt when Jesus told them he would have to suffer and die.

Some of the discussion surrounding this movie may even reflect the debates going on inside the church today about Pope Francis’ emphasis on “discernment” for people facing complicated situations, where a black-and-white approach seems inadequate. A Jesuit friend felt the essential question the movie poses is: Can we trust that God works through a person’s conscience, and that God helps us discern the right path in complex situations, where the normal rules seem inadequate to the reality of the situation?

A Jesuit spiritual tradition may also be helpful here. In the Spiritual Exercises St. Ignatius speaks of three levels, or “degrees,” of humility. The first level is when one does nothing morally wrong. In other words, one leads a good life. The second level is when a person who, when presented with the choice of riches or poverty, honor or disgrace, is free of the need for either. In other words, the person is free to accept whatever God desires, not being “attached” to one state or the other.

The third level of humility, the highest, is when a person is able to choose something dishonorable because it brings him or her closer to Christ. “I desire to be regarded as a useless fool for Christ, who before me was regarded as such,” in the words of the Spiritual Exercises. A person accepts being misunderstood, perhaps by everyone, just as Christ was.

This is what Father Rodrigues chooses, confusing as it may be to Christian Europe, to his Jesuit superiors—and even to modern-day filmgoers.

2.  Does Father Rodrigues still believe in God after his apostasy?

To my mind, definitely. Mr. Scorsese’s film is clearer on this than the novel by Shusako Endo. The novel’s epilogue, told from the vantage of a Dutch clerk in Japan, who recounts the story of Father Rodrigues after his apostasy, leaves open the question of his faith. Frankly, I found the ending of the book maddeningly vague.

The film, however, leaves no doubt, as I see it. Several scholars believe this was Endo’s underlying intent: Rodrigues holds onto his faith even after his public apostasy. Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Cocks have given filmgoers an image to convey this interpretation: the magnificent final scene, which shows Rodrigues’s funeral rites, during which his Japanese wife inserts into the dead man’s hands his old crucifix, given to him by one of his Japanese Christian friends. When I first read the scene in the script I was deeply moved by this image of “holding on” to one’s faith.

My own interpretation is that Rodrigues’s wife grasped how important the crucifix was to her husband and, in turn, how important his faith was to him. It’s also important for viewers who doubt his faith to ask themselves why Rodrigues would have held onto this object if he no longer believed—especially at risk to himself and his family.

Admittedly, I am biased. I want Father Rodrigues to have held onto his faith, and when I first read the script I was grateful for this scene, clearer than the novel’s vague ending.

At the same time, I may understand Father Rodrigues’s position in a special way. As a Jesuit I know what it is like to encounter Jesus in the Spiritual Exercises. (By the way, so does Andrew Garfield .) The notion that a Jesuit could suddenly disbelieve in the Jesus he had known for his entire Jesuit life seems absurd. Again, I am distinguishing this from the public apostasy. Even Father Ferreira, as subtly played by Liam Neeson, seems to reveal his discomfort with his public apostasy, as he shows in his conversation with Rodrigues. In the film, Ferreira’s words speak of apostasy but, to me, his face indicates he is still struggling with his decision.

But there is an easier way to see that Rodrigues still believes in God. At the end of the film, despite having publicly recanted his faith, he addresses God in prayer. “To this very day, everything I do, everything I’ve done speaks of him. It was in the silence that I heard your voice,” he says.

If he didn’t believe in God, he wouldn’t be speaking to God.

3.  Is Kichijiro intended to be a comic character?

I’ve heard that the figure of Kichijiro, initially Rodrigues’s and Garupe’s Japanese guide, and later Rodrigues’s friend, elicited some chuckles in movie theaters. Kichijiro is, by his own admission, a sinful man. He repeatedly apostatizes and cravenly turns Rodrigues in to the Japanese authorities.

Time and again, Kichijiro returns  to Rodrigues for confession, and towards the end of the film, after Rodrigues’s apostasy, he seeks out the former priest to hear his confession.

Some viewers have found Kichijiro’s manifold weaknesses and his repeated desire for confession amusing. I found it human. Who hasn’t struggled with a sin that comes back to haunt us? Who hasn’t felt embarrassed about repeatedly confessing the same sins? Who hasn’t longed for God’s forgiveness?

Towards the end of the film, this seemingly weak man also helps to bring Father Rodrigues back to his priesthood by seeking confession. In a moving scene, Father Rodrigues places his head on Kichijiro’s head, as if in prayer. Or absolution.

Kichijiro’s final scene may be the most mysterious. A Japanese authority notices a necklace around Kichijiro’s neck and rips it off. He opens the leather pouch and discovers a Christian image. Kichijiro is revealed as a Christian and is swiftly led away, presumably to die.

It took me three viewings to realize something: Kichijiro would become a traditional Christian martyr. Kichijiro would become the kind of person that Catholics would later venerate. How ironic that this “weak” man becomes the inadvertent hero, while the “stronger” man, Rodrigues, whose “martyrdom” is of a different type, will not be venerated. It is a mysterious meditation on sacrifice and martyrdom.

4. Why was God “silent”?

This is perhaps the most difficult theological question. It is not surprising that both Endo and Scorsese took the word as the title of the book and the film. Over and over, Father Rodrigues laments God’s silence. The meaning here, it would seem, is twofold.

First, Rodrigues does not experience God’s presence in his prayer, and he feels God’s absence in the lack of clarity over whether he should apostatize. Second, he feels that God is silent in not helping those being tortured and killed. The scene of the two Jesuits watching from afar as the Japanese Christians are crucified in the ocean depicts this torment.. They long for something to be “done” to prevent their deaths.

In the first case, there are numerous examples of devout Christians feeling distant from God. The  best known contemporary example is St. Teresa of Calcutta, who experienced a long “dark night” of silence for many decades, until the end of her life. Endo’s book was written before the knowledge of Mother Teresa’s silence was made public, but he was aware of other saints who have experienced silence, for example, St. John of the Cross. Like St. Teresa of Calcutta, Rodrigues does not hear God’s voice in his prayer as he once did. This is painful, but not rare.

Yet by the end of the film, Rodrigues says that God was in “everything.” (The Jesuit way of saying this is “finding God in all things.”) “It was in the silence that I heard Your voice,” he says. Besides hearing the voice of Christ asking him to trample on the fumie , he recognizes that God was all around him, even if not speaking directly to him in his prayer. God may not have been speaking to him interiorly, he realizes, but exteriorly.

The second question is more difficult. Why does God “permit” the Japanese Christians and the Jesuits to suffer? This is the great theological “problem of suffering” or “problem of evil.” In short, “Why is there suffering?” As anyone who has experienced profound suffering knows, even the devout believer, there is no satisfying answer to this question.

Three Christian perspectives, however, may be helpful.

First, the Christian believes that Jesus, who himself underwent suffering, understands suffering and is close to the one who suffers. Second, as a refinement on that insight, some theologians speak of God suffering with those who suffer. Third, Christians believes that suffering is never the last word. There is always hope of the Resurrection, of new life not only for the one who suffers, but for humanity.

Where was God when the Japanese Christians were being tortured and crucified? I would suggest: With them, close to them, beside them and watching with as much anguish as Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe did as they watched their friends being crucified in the ocean.

5. Why were the missionaries there?

This was another common question among reviewers who faulted not simply the failure ofFathers Rodrigues and Garupe to apostatize quickly, but their very presence in Japan. Why were they there at all?

The history of Christian missionaries—in Japan and elsewhere—is a complicated one. Remember that when speaking about “Christian missionaries” we are talking about a 2,000-year history that begins with St. Paul and took place in almost every country in the world. Add to that the variety of the originating countries of the missionaries, and you get an idea of the complexity of the history. Even if we consider simply the era in which the film is set, the 17th century, almost every European country, was sending Christian missionaries abroad. Also, we must take into account the wide variety of approaches among the many Catholic religious orders active in the missionary field: Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and so on. In some instances, missionary priests, brothers and sisters traveled with representatives of the colonial powers and were seen, rightly or wrongly, as adjuncts of these political actors.

But the missionaries came to these new lands to bring what they considered a gift of inestimable value to the people they would meet: the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Let us look at the case of Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe. Both have come to Japan to spread the Gospel. (We can reasonably presume their being sent from Portugal not simply to find Father Ferreira but later to remain in Japan.) They are bringing what they consider to be the most precious thing that they know to a new people: Jesus. Is it arrogant to say that they are bringing a gift? Others may think so, but not to my mind. Think of it as a physician wanting to bring medicine to someone he or she knows is in need. And doing so at peril to his or her own life.

In reality, Jesuit missionaries poured themselves out selflessly for the peoples among whom they ministered—enduring extraordinary physical hardships, mastering the local languages (even writing dictionaries for those languages, which are still in use), eating unfamiliar foods and working as hard as any of the people with whom they ministered. (Read the diaries of St. Jean de Brébeuf, one of the North American Martyrs, and his admonitions to his brother Jesuits that they needed to paddle their canoes as hard as the Hurons did, so as not to be seen as lazy.) This is called “inculturation,” a loving insertion of oneself into the local culture.

Jesuits both fictional and real did  this out of love. Out of love for God and love for the peoples with whom they were ministering. If you doubt their motivation I would ask this: Would you leave behind all that you knew—your country, your language, your family, your friends, your food, your culture, your traditions—to travel across the globe at immense risk, in order to give a gift to a group of people whom you’d never met, a group of people whom many in your home country think are unworthy of being given that gift—knowing that you might be tortured and killed? To me that is an immense act of love.

In the end, “Silence” is about love. Or maybe loves. Father Rodrigues’s and Father Garupe’s love for their old mentor, Father Ferreira. The three Jesuits’ love for the Japanese people. Father Rodrigues’s intense love for Jesus Christ.

Most of all, Jesus’s love for him, for his brother Jesuits, for the people of Japan and for all of humanity. Understand love and you will understand “Silence.”

James Martin, S.J., is editor at large of America Media, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and served as a consultant to the film “Silence.”

Catherine Cherry 7 years 3 months ago Contrary to the seven friends and Ignatian Spiritual Directors with whom I went to see this film, I felt disappointed that Fr. Rodrigues took part in an apostasy. I wanted him to be like the mother with the seven sons in Maccabees; and I kept wondering what would have happened to Christianity in Japan if he had held firm, suffered and died with the other Japanese Christians. I thought that he fell victim to the spirit of darkness masquerading as an angel of light. To me, he lost himself. In the era of Henry VIII, when St. Thomas More was confronted by his family and their suffering, and their suggestion to give in to Cromwell verbally, while maintaining his faith internally, St. Thomas More said his self was like sand in his hand and if he were false to himself it would be like opening his fingers, ultimately losing his very self. With sadness, this is what I saw happen in the film. However it did challenge me and make me stronger.

James Sullivan 7 years 3 months ago Father James: this is a great commentary on the masterpiece Silence. I saw the film twice and hope to see it one more time. The acting, the screenplay, the cinematography were all superb. The movie has stayed with me for weeks. Silence is a classic. Mr.Scorsese: We can't thank you enough for this beautiful work of cinematic art.

IGNACIO SILVA 7 years 3 months ago Thanks for that, Padre. I saw Kichijiro as the Everyman, the compulsive or addict that will quit tomorrow. Straying time and time again and confessing only to repeat. The area that is not clear, to me anyway, is the claim from Inoue that Japan is not the proper soil for Christianity. Culturally speaking, are some peoples inured to the Good News? That one left me in a quandary about the universality of C(c)atholicism. Well, for certain, Silence is not entertainment. It is a deep opus that raises doubt while stitching in faith at the seams of uncertainty.

william murphy 7 years 3 months ago While I can understand what you are saying regarding why he stepped on the image of Christ, why not end it there? He did it, flee Japan, go and continue his priesthood. But why give up the priesthood and get married?

James Lohrmann 7 years 3 months ago Fr. Martin, I enjoyed your commentary on the film and I am glad you were involved with the film. I was troubled however by your justification for Rodrigues' apostasy. Because Christ told him to do it? But how could Christ contradict the Church and the Scriptures? Jesus said if you deny me before man I will deny your before my heavenly Father. He also says that a house divided against himself cannot stand. Christ cannot contradict his words in Scripture, and if he does, we should strongly question whose voice we're actually hearing.

Father Martin, your work is incredible. I would definitely be interested in the answer to this!

This essay is a great help to understanding the film in its deeper theological/spiritual contexts. As Pope Francis likes to point out, life is messy and important decisions are rarely clear. Love is equally messy and ambivalent, as we all experience, and your emphasis on the "three loves" at play in the film really deepened my appreciation for it. I loved the movie, for its lack of clarity and pious banality. Thanks, Jim, for moving readers into the mystery of love, betrayal and commitment. I agree: Rodrigues kept his faith, deep down, right to the end of his life. And who knows? Perhaps his wife is a secret Christian at that point!

Something small that stuck out to me, which I think speaks of a larger theme, is that when the martyrs were hung on crosses in the ocean there were three of them, clearly mirroring the crucifixion of Christ. In the Endo's version there were only two. The third martyr in the movie evidences this by his relative anonymity as a character. One of Endo's points in the novel is that life can't be idealized. Christians aren't perfect, and neither is martyrdom, crucifixion, or anything in this world. Rodriguez tries very hard though, through his narration (most of the chapters are written as if they were letters of his) to idealize the things he experiences in Japan--or rather to fit them into his idea of a perfect struggle. Only two crosses is a little chink in that armor that the movie misses, and while it represents the original author's intentions fairly well, this aspect of imperfection and grayness, as Father Martin aptly describes it, is sometimes missed in its dramatization. Another example of this is the inquisitor, who is described literarily as (at least on the surface) a pleasant old Japanese man, while he is played on screen as obviously repugnant and scheming. Rodriguez also repeatedly (in both versions of the story) meditates on Christ's face and its beauty. While I now understand more about the Jesuit perspective in relation to Christ, I couldn't help thinking about Isaiah 53:2 every time I saw this. This verse states: "he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him", and it is consistent, I think, to the idea that the message of the Gospel is not alluring from the perspective from the world. Rodriguez doesn't quite understand Father Martin's answer to the first question.

The point of the story, for me, is to accept that it is impossible to be blameless, to understand our problems, and to try to follow Christ's example all the same. Kichijiro is the perfect example.

Thank you, Fr Martin. I have just seen SILENCE, and it will not leave me. I thought Andrew Garfield communicated so well the internal struggle of Rodrigues, and I had to let go of my own preference for how the movie was to turn out and embrace the character and not a particular desired ending. Your assessment of Kichijiro is spot on - he is all of us who sin and sin again, and who, hopefully, continually seek forgiveness. Classic film, eternal struggle, certainty not an option.

During Father Rodrigues's "apostasy" scene, I was devastated sitting in the theater, literally with my hands grappling my head... until the voice of Jesus. At that point a grateful catharsis hit me. What an effective way to remind Christians of Jesus's suffering so that we might live. Rodrigues was already forgiven this sin, and I also believe his faith, though tested, remained intact. If not for the last scene, then based on other visual signals, like the blue, patterned kimono Rodrigues wore in a scene shortly after. Its design could have been construed as hundreds of tiny crosses. I like to believe that was Mr. Scorsese trying to clue the audience in on the enduring strength of Father Rodrigues's relationship with Jesus.

The apostasy of Father Rodriguez could be viewed as an act of weakness. Certainly he has a character with its weaknesses. Who does not? Does Christ order his apostasy? Christ does not order someone to commit sin.

Does Christ ask Father Rodriguez to apostasize? Certainly Christ never asks a person to sin. I see Christ's words at that moment as meaning that Christ promises not to abandon him in what fate has allowed to happen. Christ says that he will abandon him to his weakness. Father Rodriguez is weak, but weakness is a human thing. Who can boast that he cannot be broken? An idle boast. Father Rodriguez is weak, but he is a man who has been touched by Christ, he is a man in transformation, a man underway, a man like you and I. Stubbornness is not a virtue. Faith is a gift of God. Thank you Father Martin for thoughtful reflections on a thoughtful Christian film.

In the novel we hear what Fr Rodrigues hears. People talking, the wind, the moans of Christians suffering, and over and over the cicada. Not until the end do we hear the comfort brought by Jesus in the Silence. There is another dimension to this novel, namely accompaniment. Rodrigues often sees the Christian old lady and describes her as the one who gave him a cucumber. She was with him. And so is Kichijiro. He is the one that brings him back to his faith. But in what sense did Fr Rodrigues loose his faith. Only in the sense of the rules that he violated of his Portuguese church. He feels excommunicated because of their rules. Not the rules of Jesus. Jesus still turns to him as he did to Peter when the cock crowed, which the novel does remind us of. It is Kichijiro that stays with him through his torture and yes even seduces him into capture. But he still returns and returns and returns. And eventually, he returns to Jesus, yes this stinking, weak creature brings the presence of Christ to Fr. Rodrigues.

I wanted to see the movie only after reading the novel, which I recently did. Hope I can still find a place to see the movie these days.

In the novel, that Father Rodrigues actually heard the command by Jesus to trample on the fumie is not so clear. As he steps on it, a cock crews, signaling an act of treason. And the end of the novel, there is no love between Ferreira and Rodrigues, as they both hate what they see in the other: a man that receives salary as a collaborator, a man that have been given a Japanese wive and a Japanese name by the evil magistrate Inoue -their new master.

Ferreira and Rodrigues do immediately save Japanese Christians lives with their own apostasy, but how many do they condemn as monthly consultors for the Japanese Inquisition? Especially Ferreria comes out as corrupt with his servile laughter towards his patrons and his assault on the weakened Rodrigues in the dungeon: "Even Christ would apostatize out of love!"... "You will now perform the must painful act of love of your life..." Truly wicked, as Ferreira seeks to transfer responsability for the lives of the Christian peasants from the sadistic inquisitor to his tormented former pupil.

Splendid novel. May God bless Japan and reward its thousands of anonymous martyrs with the conversion of the country.

I have a question. [On page 87] When Monica, Juan and the other the Japanese peasants are about to be martyred, Rodrigues exclaims, "Don't you realize that we are all going to die in the same way?" Monica offers they will find everlasting happiness and peace in Heaven. However, at this moment, Rodrigues felt like shouting, "Heaven is not the sort of place you think it is!"

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Scorsese's 'Silence' is his most Catholic film

Andrew Garfield, left, plays Fr. Rodrigues, and Shinya Tsukamoto plays Mokichi in the film "Silence" by Paramount Pictures, SharpSword Films, and AI Films. (Kerry Brown)

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Shûsaku Endô (1923-1996) was a Japanese Catholic novelist whose extensive writings probed the conflicts and paradoxes of faith. He was born in Tokyo, lived in Manchuria, then returned to Japan and was baptized at about the age of 11. After university, he married, had a son and lived in France. The novelist Graham Greene, with whom Endo has often been compared, said he was "one of the finest living novelists" of his time.

In 1966, Endô published Silence ( Chinmoku ) , a work of historical fiction about Jesuit missionaries to Japan in the 17th century. Most believe it is his masterpiece. At long last, 28 years after reading the novel, Oscar-winning director, writer, actor and producer Martin Scorsese is bringing this story to the screen .

Word reaches Portugal and then Rome that Fr. Cristóvão Ferriera (Liam Neeson), the Jesuit superior in Japan, has renounced his faith and apostatized. Many clergy and lay people have suffered martyrdom in the past few years when the authorities banished Christianity from the country and now the mission has floundered. Yet no one can believe Ferriera has apostatized and ceased to preach the Gospel. In 1635, two young Jesuit priests, Fr. Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Fr. Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), with the permission of their superior Fr. Alessandro Valignano (Ciarán Hinds), set sail for Japan to rescue their former seminary professor and mentor. Their fervor knows no limits.

After a long voyage and stop in Goa, their ship docks in Macao where the two priests meet a Japanese man, a drunk named Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), that they hope will guide them to Japan. He will not admit to being a Christian, but he does want to go home. The priests endure hardship but press forward with a guide who seems less than trustworthy.

After another long voyage with almost nothing to their names, they arrive at an island and wade to shore. Soon enough villagers recognize the "padres" and hide them away. The priests discover that Christians are living underground, baptizing their babies and praying in secret. They learn that Kichijiro is a Christian when he asks for absolution for his apostasy that had caused him to flee Japan.

It is too much for the priests to stay hidden and they venture out. They meet Christians who are grateful for their return but fearful for the padres if they are caught. But word spreads and the authorities investigate. A cunning inquisitor, Inoue (Issei Ogata), insists that Christians make themselves known and apostatize or three will be taken and killed. Three men, one of them in his 80s, refuse to step on the image of Mother and Child. Inoue's men tie them to crosses and raise them up in the ocean where they are buffeted incessantly by the waves for days until they die. The priests watch from a cave, stunned at what their presence has provoked.

The two priests decide to separate in their search for Ferriera whom they believe is in Nagasaki. Rodrigues meets Christians and hands out all the crosses and religious items he has and even gives away the beads of his rosary, one by one. He wonders if the people have more faith in sacramentals than in Jesus.

Later, Rodrigues watches as Garrpe drowns while trying to save Christians who have been thrown into the sea wrapped in mats. Rodrigues is eventually captured and made to ride a horse through a village while the people jeer and throw stones at him. Kichijiro's fervor waxes and wanes; he denies his faith only to return for absolution that Rodrigues gives him — time and time again because he apostatizes whenever he is captured. It becomes clear to Rodrigues that the weak Kichijiro is a Judas-figure. Inoue is never far and directs the inquisition of Rodrigues, challenging the priest by saying Japan is a swamp where the Christian message cannot take root. Rodrigues, unbending, responds that the truth, whether in Europe or in Japan, is the same.

Rodrigues ministers to a small group of Christians who are jailed with him. Then Inoue threatens the priest with "the pit" torture where he, and the other Christians, will be hung upside down over an enclosed pit of excrement until death or until he apostatizes. But where, in all this, is Ferriera? And Rodrigues wonders, where is God in the suffering of the people and his own anguish? Why is God silent?

"Silence" is replete with layered human, theological, and spiritual themes that writers Jay Cocks and Scorsese imbue with respect for their subject. For those who know the book, there is time compression, and the character of Inoue is an amalgam of all the inquisitors or officials in the story. Monica, a Christian woman in the final part of the book, shows up in the early scenes. Scorsese has added something to the end of the story, the very end of the book, the inclusion of which I will leave for you to judge. The cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto is either atmospherically panoramic or intensely close-up and personal. This, along with the accomplished editing of Scorsese's frequent collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, reveals Scorsese's Catholic and sacramental imagination at its most refined, in haunting beauty. Garfield and Driver are very good, and Driver has the look of an El Greco Christ.

There are violent scenes in the film, but Scorsese stays close to the book and shows visual restraint, something that surprised me given the explicit gore in many of his previous films. Some day, when we have all processed this film, I think we will see that "Silence" marks the height of his artistry and storytelling as a Catholic filmmaker where the character of the saint and the sinner are always near.

At the top of the thematic list are faith and doubt as partners in a dangerous dance from the moment the priests first find out about Ferriera's apostasy. They leave Portugal and Rome, their gaze focused on a land far away, bolstered by a faith yet untested. Rodrigues especially carries in his heart the image of Jesus so dear to him as a child and in the seminary. Once imprisoned it comes to him in the suffering of the people and in the night. It is this Jesus with whom he converses about his doubts, his questions and the choice he faces.

The high-pitched whine of the highly intelligent and informed inquisitor Inoue, with his polite manners and saccharine but sinister smile, do not mask his intent to break the resolve of the Christians. He challenges Rodrigues, as does Ferriera when he and Rodrigues finally meet, saying that Christianity is too Western and cannot adapt to Japan. Rodrigues says that the church is the source of truth and is unable to move off the script he learned growing up in Catholic Portugal. His responses to Inoue are noble perhaps, but ineffective. The inculturation of the Gospel and adaptation, even today, remains a challenge to those who evangelize, at home or afar.

Kichijiro, absolved again and again for his apostasy, is emblematic of sinners who are self-aware of their sin and just as cognizant of God's mercy. Kichijiro disgusts Rodrigues, and it takes the priest a long time to realize that he, too, is a weak human not so different from this dirty beggar of a sinner who cannot help himself.

On Dec. 5 Scorsese, along with members of the cast and crew, spoke to a packed audience after a screening of "Silence" at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Days have passed, and I and my sister, Libby Weatherfield, cannot stop thinking about the film. The first thing Libby said, however, as the lights came up was, "Well, this isn't a crowd pleaser." In truth, it's not meant to be.

Even director George Lucas, who introduced the film, said, "The best way I can describe it to you is that it is interesting, because it is definitely a Martin Scorsese movie." Then he seemed to think about it a little more and said, "It's pretty extraordinary. It's one of those movies from the last century where we made all kinds of … independent, not mainstream movies. That he even got it made is a big deal. I hope you enjoy it. It's very emotional. And there's blood in it. It's Martin."

During the question-and-answer session after, Scorsese recounted his life growing up as a Roman Catholic in Manhattan and spending a year in a high school minor seminary from which he was invited to leave.

He spoke about making his 1988 film "The Last Temptation of Christ" and how people either hated it or loved it and that he spent a year going around the world either discussing or arguing about it. But there was an Episcopal priest in New York, Paul Moore, who didn't hate the film. He gave Scorsese Silence and suggested he read it. He put it aside for a year, but when in Japan in 1989 acting in the film "Dreams" for Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Scorsese read Silence and determined to make it into a film.

Actor Andrew Garfield, who has described himself as Jewish, said that making "Silence" "transcended filmmaking" for him:

How do we show a man living a question on a movie screen, a man living in a prayer for two and a half hours? I gave myself a good year to immerse myself in all things Jesuit to understand what the word God means to me on a personal level and I made the Spiritual Exercises that St. Ignatius created, that are a rite of passage for Jesuits and members of the Catholic faith … and the idea of the active imagination. The Exercises create a transformative process in the person that makes them. Then I would talk to Marty, often at length, and we would always end up with five or six minutes of silence at the end of the conversation because we knew we had gotten as close to the core of the answer to the question possible yet we were so many light years away from the answer. He would say, 'Okay kid, until next time,' and we would never get beyond this. We would always go deeper and deeper yet further and further away from the answer. Preparing for this film was a profound journey in that way and that's the beauty and the agony of the book, the beauty and the agony of the story, the beauty and the agony of living a life of faith because it means living a life of doubt. It's the same thing as showing up on the film set every day, you have no idea of what you are doing and if you think you do, you are in trouble. What we see in all Marty's films, but in this film especially is that something deep and profound and transformative is happening in the film and within the audience absorbing it.

Adam Driver, who grew up in a Christian home, said that: "An anguished faith seemed to make sense to me. I don't know if it's because I was raised in a religious household but it's like any relationship with your parents or your kids. It's not as easy as making a decision and that's it. ... It is filled with doubt and second-guessing yourself; there's insecurity and misery. Getting ready for this I kept in mind St. Peter because this image made sense to me, as someone who is very committed but who cannot help but question and doubt every step of the way."

A man in the audience asked Scorsese, " 'The Last Temptation of Christ' and 'Silence' — in your art and mind where do these two films find each other?"

He replied, giving away part of the film's ending:

'The Last Temptation of Christ' took me to a certain point in my journey. It had to do with the Incarnation and my belief that Christ being fully divine, fully human and what this could mean. ... There seemed to be further to go [on that journey] after. But it's just isn't as simple as that. It's not a simple film and it's not a simple book. … But for myself, as a believer, unbeliever, doubter, have faith, not have faith, go through life, making mistakes, I don't know. Trying to make life better, to feel your way through to live in a better way for yourself and others primarily, 'The Last Temptation of Christ' didn't take me that far. ... I knew [ Silence ] was for me, at this point in my life, the beckoning, the call. It said, 'Figure me out,' or at least try to. ... I am not Thomas Merton, I'm not Dorothy Day… so you admire them and everything else but … how can you be like them? ... How do you live it in your daily life? That is to get to the essence, I think, for me, as a Roman Catholic, true Christianity. Because when [Fr. Rodrigues] does apostatize, he gives up anything he's proud of and he's got nothing left except service, except compassion. So, he gives up his religion, he gives up his faith in order to gain his faith. Wow. How do you do that? That's amazing. Could you do that?

[Sr. Rose Pacatte, a member of the Daughters of St. Paul, is the director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Los Angeles.]

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Review: Questions and Prayers Go Unanswered in Scorsese’s ‘Silence’

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By Manohla Dargis

• Dec. 22, 2016

Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” is a story of faith and anguish. It tells of a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Rodrigues, who in 1643 heads into the dark heart of Japan, where Christians are being persecuted — boiled alive, immolated and crucified. Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) sets out to help keep the church alive in Japan, a mission that perhaps inevitably leads to God. The film’s solemnity is seductive — as is Mr. Scorsese’s art — especially in light of the triviality and primitiveness of many movies, even if its moments of greatness also make its failures seem more pronounced.

Mr. Scorsese’s work has long involved struggles of faith of one kind or another, from the religious guilt that afflicts Harvey Keitel’s thug in “Mean Streets” (“ You don’t make up for your sins in t he c hurch .”) through that circle of hell known as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In “Silence” the struggle begins in a mist-wreathed landscape where severed human heads rest on a crude shelf, like trophies of some ghastly victory. Today, decapitations in the name of religion are a gruesome hallmark of Islamist extremists, but here they introduce a dispute involving the Japanese authorities, who, intent on maintaining the country’s power and isolation, are set on eradicating Christianity, its proselytizers and converts.

Figures soon emerge from the mist, notably Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who, as gaunt and tormented as any martyred Caravaggio saint, watches in gaping horror as guards ladle water from hot springs on shrieking Christians. Rodrigues learns about this hellish scene from Father Valignano (Ciaran Hinds), who also relates that Ferreira has renounced his religion and is living as “a Japanese.” Rodrigues, having studied with Ferreira, refuses to accept that the older priest’s belief has been shattered and departs for Japan accompanied by another priest, Father Garupe ( a fine, underused Adam Driver ), and a Japanese guide, Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka, excellent).

The movie’s early scenes are filled with severe pictorial beauty as the pale thermal steam snaking around the martyred Christians gives way to the vaulted white room where the black-clothed Jesuits meet. The chromatic contrast between the inkiness of their cassocks and the room’s ascetic whiteness finds an echo in Rodrigues’s rigid dualism, a belief in absolutes that will be tested. His resoluteness even seems answered by the calm camerawork (no jitters here), which early on is dramatically punctuated by a ravishing overhead shot of the three Jesuit priests gliding down a flight of stony, bleach-white stairs, as if they were being looked down on from high above.

Whether this represents God’s vision or that of the priests, it is very much the point of view of the movie’s own creator. This overhead shot and others suggest that there’s a divine aspect to the priests’ mission, an idea that Mr. Scorsese visually and narratively underlines in the Lazarus-like cave in which Rodrigues and Garupe first take shelter in Japan; in Rodrigues’s self-aggrandizing identification with Jesus; and, crucially, through the figure of Judas. As in Mr. Scorsese’s 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” his messy, excitingly alive adaptation of that Nikos Kazantzakis novel, Judas must play a part in “Silence” because without him there can be no Jesus.

Once in Japan, Rodrigues and Garupe make contact with a village of hidden Christians, who live in fear of the authorities and a cobralike smiler known as the Inquisitor, Inoue ( Issey Ogata , in one of the film’s strongest performances). By day, the priests hide in a small, cramped hut near the village; by night, they lead their new flock in dimly lighted rooms, delivering sermons in Latin, baptizing children and taking confession. Mr. Scorsese draws some modest, uneasy comedy from the linguistic and cultural differences between the priests and their congregation, as when a grabby, highly agitated woman begs the rather startled Garupe to hear her confession.

Despite the mugging from both confessor and confessed, the exchange feels forced and comes across as a bid to lighten the gloom; if anything, it turns a feverish plea for absolution into a bit of vaudeville. There’s something uncomfortably and literally childlike about this child of God, who, like the other villagers, with their pleading eyes and hands, seems like a relic from a white-savior myth. Kichijiro, who enters grunting and twitching, as if in homage to Toshiro Mifune , and grovels at the priest’s feet, also seems on hand as much for comic relief as for guidance. Yet, even as the film seems to share the outsider perspectives of Rodrigues and Garupe, instructively, it is the village elders — brilliantly played by Yoshi Oida and Shinya Tsukamoto — who give these scenes flesh, bone and pain.

“Silence” is based on the 1966 novel by the Japanese author Shusaku Endo that has attracted heavyweight admirers since it was first published. Graham Greene praised the novel, as did John Updike; for years, Mr. Scorsese tried to turn it into a film. (He wrote the foreword for a recent edition.) Filled with reams of religious dialogue, the novel fictionalizes history — the 17th-century purging of Christianity in Japan — as a means to explore religious faith and cultural difference. What preoccupies Endo is whether Western Christianity can take root in what the Inquisitor describes as “this swamp of Japan,” which seems inhospitable to outside forces. It’s a story of God, nation and myth.

It’s easy to understand Mr. Scorsese’s interest in the novel and specifically in the character of Rodrigues. Despite the priest’s piety, black vestments and narrative prominence, he is no more a Hollywood hero than most of Mr. Scorsese’s falling and fallen men, with their arrogance and vanity. Rodrigues cowers in fear, recoils from his flock and assures himself of the goodness that the church — and he, by extension — has brought. (He pities the worshipers but is proud of his ministering.) His faith, including in himself, sustains Rodrigues, but even as he tends to the souls of the hidden Christians he fails to ease their earthly suffering. God is silent; in a way, so is this most ardent missionary.

The silence of the title resounds insistently; it’s in the screams of the faithful and in Rodrigues’s endless searching. Why, he agonizes with no self-awareness, does God not answer prayers and alleviate suffering, a question which proves too heavy a load for Mr. Garfield’s talents. When he plays against the other actors, he can seem as decorative as a plaster saint (his luxuriously styled hair is right out of a 1950s biblical epic), which makes the other performers and their characters look stronger, and works for the story. Rodrigues is weak. But it’s weakness without depth or the burning belief that would make his errors shattering. When he carries on alone, speaking to God, questioning and suffering at great, monotonous length, his weakness becomes tedious, as does the film.

“Silence” argues against orthodoxy, but its messenger is too pallid. This is less the fault of Mr. Garfield than of Mr. Scorsese’s conception of Rodrigues as the story’s fulcrum instead of its void. Mr. Scorsese fills the film with haunting tableaus and performances — including from Tadanobu Asano, as the Interpreter — that tug from the edges, pulling attention away from its center. In the end, nothing that Rodrigues says resonates as deeply as Inoue’s terrifying, teasing whine, which conveys the larger cultural and political stakes; nothing imparts the mystery of creation as potently as the flicker of a darting emerald lizard or an eerie parade of cats prowling through a spookily deserted village.

These moments shake “Silence” and you too; the movie could use more jolts, more trembling, more surrealism; maybe, as in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” a talking lion to go along with its trippy lizard. “Silence” is as visually striking as you might expect, but also overly tidy, clean and decorous, despite its tortured flesh, its mud and its blood. There’s a crushing lack of urgency to this story and its telling, perhaps because it took Mr. Scorsese, who wrote the script with Jay Cocks, so long to make “Silence.” It’s disappointing because few directors can engage doubt and belief as powerfully as Mr. Scorsese can, but also because doubt and belief have again set the world on fire.

Silence Rated R for gruesome torture. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes.

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Silence Is Easier to Admire Than to Love

Martin Scorsese’s new film about Christian missionaries in 17th-century Japan is a powerful work that is in part undone by the director’s own passion.

Silence , the new film by Martin Scorsese, opens with almost as literal a vision of Hell as one could imagine. The year is 1633; the place, a craggy, volcanic expanse near Nagasaki called Unzen. Through the sulphur fumes and scalding vapor, we see European men, their hands tied, being led by Japanese soldiers to the boiling springs that dot the landscape. Their robes are parted and searing water poured on their skin. In voiceover, it is explained that the ladles used are perforated such that each individual drop may strike the skin “like a burning coal.” The springs themselves are called, aptly enough, jigoku , or “hells.”

The man narrating this excruciating torture is Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a Jesuit missionary. The victims, who number in the dozens, are his fellow Catholic priests. Christianity has been outlawed as a threat to Japanese culture and it is being burned out of the country in the most direct manner available.

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Father Ferreira’s observations are committed to a letter, and it is in that context that we hear them again. It is now 1640, seven years after the horrors he recounted, and a senior Jesuit (Ciarán Hinds) is reading the letter to two young priests who were once Ferreira’s pupils, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver). The elder priest also informs them that Ferreira subsequently disappeared and is rumored to have “apostatized”—that is, renounced God.

Rodrigues and Garupe refuse to believe this of their beloved mentor, and they vow to find him and dispel the slander. Their superior accedes to their mission, though he reminds them of the extraordinary danger they will face from the moment they set foot in Japan: “You will be the last two priests ever sent.”

Silence is based on the celebrated 1966 novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō, and Scorsese has been vowing to bring it to the big screen ever since he first read the book in 1989. At the time, he was dealing with the blowback to his controversial The Last Temptation of Christ , and in Endō’s story of faith and doubt, he felt echoes of both his recent experience and his longtime relationship with the Church, of which he had once intended to become a priest.

Nearly 30 years in the making, Silence is a heartfelt and serious work. But through length and redundancy—both, no doubt, the product of Scorsese’s deep admiration for Endō—as well as an underwhelming central performance by Garfield, it ultimately falls short of its powerful ambitions.

The two priests, Rodrigues and Garupe, are smuggled into Japan by Kichijiro (Yōsuke Kubozuka), a fickle and intemperate drunk. (There is a noticeable echo of the legendary Toshiro Mifune in the performance.) There, they encounter a town populated by secret Christians, and their mission begins to shift, from finding and rescuing Ferreira to ministering to these devout peasants, who live in terror of discovery by the authorities. The Japan of these early scenes—conjured by the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto—is a misery of rock and rain, in which mud-bound villages can hope for little more than not to be swept entirely out to sea.

Eventually, official “inquisitors” do come to the town in which the priests are hiding, and the two men are forced to split up. For the remainder of the film, we follow the journey of Rodrigues as he witnesses atrocities against his fellow Christians—crucifixions, drownings, a beheading—grapples with his own faith, and is himself captured. Most of all, he suffers from the apparent “silence” with which God answers his prayers.

The tradeoff repeatedly extended by the authorities to those suspected of Christian belief would seem a simple one. Just place one’s foot on a fumi-e , a small plaque bearing a likeness of Christ or the Virgin, and one will escape punishment and perhaps be freed. Refuse, and one will face torture or worse.

Many of the peasants questioned refuse to step on the fumi-e and suffer accordingly. But many are willing to make that concession—and are, in fact encouraged by Rodrigues to do so—in order to keep their lives. Among the latter is the priests’ initial guide, Kichijiro, whose continued vacillation between apostasy and confession makes him one of the film’s more infuriating and provocatively human figures.

As is no doubt apparent, Silence is not an easy film to watch, its 160-minute running time awash in images of pain and cruelty. But neither is it a mere cinematic exercise in physical endurance or the punishments of the flesh, such as Unbroken or even The Revenant . Scorsese is attempting something far more interesting: a portrait of the endurance of the soul .

It is not, after all, Rodrigues’s body that is being tormented, but those of the people around him. And it is made abundantly clear that it is within his power to make it stop if only he will himself apostatize. As the chief inquisitor, Inoue, cunningly played by Issey Ogata, explains: “We learned from our mistakes. Killing priests only makes them stronger.” Another interrogator puts it still more directly when Rodrigues insists that the victims around him “didn’t die for nothing.” “No,” he replies. “They died for you.”

But for all the torments they inflict, the Japanese inquisitors are no generic movie villains. They truly believe that Christianity is incompatible with the Japanese spirit, an alien pathogen imported by arrogant and incurious Europeans. And the film gives this case its due. It is notable, for instance, that none of the Jesuits we encounter speaks more than a tiny smattering of Japanese, but peasants and inquisitors alike manage to make themselves understood in Portuguese (rendered in the film as English). One of Rodrigues’s captors—played superbly by Tadanobu Asano—is fluent enough to function as a full-time translator.

Indeed, one of the chief weaknesses of Silence is that so many of the characters in orbit around Rodrigues convey more narrative gravity than he does himself: Asano’s translator, Ogata’s inquisitor, Kubozuka’s fickle Kichijiro, Driver’s Father Garupe, a village elder played by Yoshi Oida. Andrew Garfield is a fine actor, but his calling card has always been a kind of boyish ingenuousness, and here it is tested beyond its limits.

Garfield’s previous major role of the year, Hacksaw Ridge , is illustrative. In it, as in Silence , he plays a devout Christian—one who served as an Army medic in World War II and, despite his refusal to carry a firearm, rescued 75 of his gravely injured comrades from the battlefield. But in Hacksaw Ridge , this Christian spirit was emphatic, uplifting, a source of near-limitless strength. It was the solution to the problem at hand. In Silence , by contrast, Garfield faces the far heavier challenge of grappling with the possibility that it might be the problem . Far from saving lives, Rodrigues’s faith is costing them.

Scorsese does Garfield no favors by extending his protagonist’s torments to such extreme lengths. The film is full of moments that, for all their elegance and power, feel repetitive: yet another scene of peasants being commanded to step on the fumi-e ; another brutal torture; another confrontation between Rodrigues and the inquisitors in which each side talks past the other—universal truth versus cultural difference—without success.

These philosophical disputes, too, rarely achieve the depth or richness for which one hopes. Late in the film it is suggested, intriguingly, that perhaps the Christian faith of the Japanese peasants isn’t really Christian at all, that due to a long-ago error of translation, they worship not the “Son,” but the “Sun.” Alas, Scorsese’s film is more interested in cataloguing Rodrigues’s ongoing spiritual anguishes than in pulling further on such theological threads.

It all comes to an end—though I should warn, there’s still a half-hour left—when Rodrigues finally completes his mission and learns the fate of his mentor, Father Ferreira. I will not reveal what he discovers, but I will say that it feels like a moment that could easily have taken place far earlier in the film.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Silence is an indisputably worthy film from one of our greatest living directors, one that searchingly tackles questions of faith and doubt and duty. The visuals supplied by Prieto are themselves worth the price of admission—the desperate peasants crawling up over the side of a boat, like pirates or mermen; a town abandoned to a community of feral cats; a sea cave that functions like a portal from one world to the next. Scorsese’s abiding passion and respect for his source material are everywhere in evidence. For once, perhaps, they are a little too great.

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‘silence’: film review.

Martin Scorsese wrestles his religious obsessions to the ground in medieval Japan in his new drama, 'Silence.'

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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For many decades, the struggle, and sometimes the glory, of religious belief was a continuing preoccupation for numerous major film directors, from John Ford, Leo McCarey , Frank Borzage and Cecil B. DeMille in Hollywood to Carl Dreyer , Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and, in his own perverse way, Luis Bunuel internationally. In recent times, however, apart from faith-based filmmaking for a target audience, from which no known auteurs have yet emerged, religion as a recurring and serious topic has virtually disappeared from the American screen, except in certain works by Mel Gibson and Martin Scorsese .

In the long-gestating Silence, the latter has arguably made his most focused and searching exploration of the subject that has been both an explicit and implicit driving force behind many of his films. Not all dream projects turn out well, but this one comes within shouting distance.

Release date: Dec 23, 2016

The film is shot in a restrained, classical style, with very few of the director’s virtuoso camera and editing moves. It’s also resolutely, even single-mindedly focused on its central theme, creating an unvarying dramatic temperature and tone that is only relieved somewhat in the second half. Scorsese’s reputation and some strong critical support will assure interest among discerning big city audiences for this Paramount release, but the work’s grim nature and imposing length will likely keep the masses away.

Based on Shusaku Endo’s acclaimed and enduring 1966 novel, which was made into a well-received Japanese film by Masahiro Shinoda five years later, Scorsese’s version is, to a bit of a fault, almost exclusively concerned with the issue reflected by the book’s title — that is, God’s deafening, soul-churning, doubt-and-madness producing silence in the face of both endless human suffering and the devout’s unceasing efforts to receive some form of divine guidance as regards to their earthly endeavors.

To explore this weighty, endlessly ponderable conundrum, Endo, a Japanese Catholic, used the real history of Japan’s Edict of Expulsion of 1614, designed to ban and eradicate Christianity from its islands, a policy pursued mercilessly. Into the perilous fray, in 1643, sneak two young Portuguese Jesuit priests who, while trying to aid the renegade faithful along the way, are mainly aiming to track down the eminent Father Cristavao Ferreira, a revered pioneering priest in Japan who has reportedly renounced his faith and of late has gone silent.

The brave and foolhardy army of two consists of Father Sebastiao Rodrigues ( Andrew Garfield ) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), who embark from a positively poisonous-looking Macao to be dumped off the perilous Japanese coast. They get an appetizer of misfortunes to come as they suffer from cold, hunger and general miserableness. But they do happen upon a forlorn Christian cult that takes them in, and among them is a bedraggled English-speaking interpreter ( Tadanobu Asano ) able to brief them on the dire circumstances now facing those who continue to follow a foreign deity in Nippon .

Soaked as it is in squalor and the seeming hopelessness of the priests’ journey, the film has some trouble achieving lift-off; the two priests are characterized only by their tenacious belief and dogged endurance, traits strenuously and somewhat monotonously underlined by Garfield and Driver to the virtual exclusion of all other human qualities. Through this first stretch, at least, the film’s narrow focus, along with the priests’ aggravated earnestness, invite a certain tedium, just as their cause seems all but hopeless.

Capture for Christians under these circumstances means one thing, the demand to apostatize, a renunciation of faith made easy by the authorities; all you have to do is step on a small plate bearing Jesus’ likeness. But you never know; some apologists get off the hook but others are executed anyway and in ingenious ways designed expressly to prolong the agony, including crucifixion on crosses placed in a harbor where the tide will eventually rise to head-level, and being suspended in a coffin-sized hole with your neck pierced in a manner that the blood will drip, drop by drop, for ages until you die. Scorsese makes these scenes plenty visceral but fortunately knows where to draw the line. When Sebastaio is offered 300 pieces of silver to renounce Christ, he ruefully notes that this is a hundred times more than Judas was paid to betray Jesus.

Working on very rugged locations in Taiwan, Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto strongly evoke a physical setting as forbidding and inhospitable as the authorities who rule it; the visuals incorporate beauty where it is to be found, but mainly inject it with a sense of nature’s sublime indifference and potential for terror. Working in league with this is a subdued, minimalist score by Kathryn and Kim Allen Kluge which, incidentally, is nothing like the jangly , propulsively modern music featured in the film’s trailer, which fortunately is nowhere to be heard in the finished work itself.

At length, Sebastaio and Francisco come to a parting of the ways, leaving the former to forge ahead alone. The solo explorer comes upon another Christian enclave in a remote fishing village, but is soon betrayed, arrested and jailed while awaiting trial, an experience that convinces his feverish mind that he is now following in Jesus’ footsteps. “I will not abandon you,” he avows.

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Except perhaps in a musical by Gilbert and Sullivan, one would not expect a character called The Inquisitor to figure as comic relief, but so it is with the one played here with exquisite high humor by Issey Ogata. Inquisitor Inoue exercises the gravest powers, the ability to decide anyone’s life or death, but Ogata, a veteran actor working in Japanese and English, makes him a man keen to enjoy his work, especially when it offers the prospect of a lively debate in which he holds the upper hand.

Blithely telling his prisoner that Christianity “is of no use in Japan” and confident that he can get even this intense young man to apostatize, the Inquisitor wants to keep Sebastaio around for a while, during which time some believers hung upside down to be bled dry provide a constant motivation to repent and be done with it. The way this grisly test of Sebastiao’s belief is crossed with the Inquisitor’s blithe humor proves terrifically effective. It all leads, finally, to a grimly riveting encounter between the young priest and none other than the long-lost Father Cristovao (Liam Neeson ), who lays it all on the table about how he dealt with the same mighty challenge facing Sebastiao now and the prospects for their religion in Japan (where not long before there had been between 200-300,000 Christians).

Ultimately, then, despite the bumpiness of the initial stretch and the intense but narrow conception of the leading roles, Silence gets to where it wants to go, which is to stand as Scorsese’s own reckoning with the religion he was raised in and takes seriously, and which has arguably fueled so much of the inner turmoil and angst that has marked much of his work; this can rightly be regarded as a considerable feat. Germinating — one might even say festering — inside him for 26 years (Jay Cocks and Scorsese wrote their first draft of the script eons ago), Silence, more successfully than not, artfully addresses the core issue of its maker’s lifelong religious struggle. He has flirted with and danced around the subject in many of his other films, most often those featuring transgressive and violent characters, but of his explicitly religious dramas, specifically including Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ, this is, by a considerable distance, the most eloquent and coherent.

Distributor: Paramount Production companies: EFO Fims , YLK , G&G, Sikelia , Fabrica de Cine Cast: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Liam Neeson , Tadanobu Asano , Ciaran Hinds, Issey Ogata, Shinya Tsukamoto , Yoshi Oida , Yosuke Kubozuka Director: Martin Scorsese Screenwriters: Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese ; based on the novel by Shusaku Endo Producers: Martin Scorsese , Emma Tillinger Koskoff , Randall Emmett, Barbara De Fina , Gaston Pavlovich , Irwin Winkler, Vittorio Cecchi Gori , David Lee Executive producers: Dale A. Brown, Matthew Maleck , Manu Gargi , Tyler Zacharia , Ken Kao, Dan Kao, Niels Juul , Chad A. Verdi, Len Blavatnik , Aviv Giladi , Lawrence Bender, Stuart Ford Director of photography: Rodrigo Prieto Production designer: Dante Ferreti Costume designer: Dante Ferreti Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker Music: Kim Allen Kluge, Kathryn Kluge Visual effects supervisor: Pablo Helman Casting: Ellen Lewis

Rated R, 162 minutes

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Review: Martin Scorsese’s ‘Silence’ is an anguished masterwork of spiritual inquiry

Justin Chang reviews “Silence,” Martin Scorsese’s film starring Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson and Ciarán Hinds.

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Near the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s shattering “Silence,” two young Jesuit missionaries shiver in a cottage far from their Portuguese homeland, taking shelter from the rain and the watchful eyes of those to whom they have sought to bring their gospel. The year is 1639, and Japan is in the midst of its Edo period, an era of strict isolationism and intense hostility toward Christianity, whose many adherents have been subjected to mass torture and execution.

When the missionaries hear voices calling “Padre!” from outside, Father Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), fearing a trap, insists that they do nothing. But Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) bravely opens the door and is relieved to greet two Japanese Christians who have traveled from a nearby island, desperate for the sacraments that only these foreigners can confer.

As the priests will soon learn, the consequences of answering God’s call are not always so clear or edifying. “Silence,” magisterially adapted by Scorsese and Jay Cocks from Shūsaku Endō’s revered 1966 novel, knows this down to its bones. It ponders the dogmas, riddles and anxieties of Christian faith with a rigor and seriousness that, with a few exceptions — Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine” come to mind — has few recent equivalents in world cinema.

These artists may regard the divine with a measure of ambivalence, but they rarely speak from a place of neutrality. Endō wrote “Silence,” his acknowledged masterpiece, partly in response to the discrimination he experienced as a Japanese Catholic. (He also co-wrote the striking 1971 film adaptation directed by Masahiro Shinoda.) Scorsese, for his part, has made his Catholicism a visual and dramatic fixture of much of his work — never more controversially than in “The Last Temptation of Christ” — and this anguished, contemplative new movie, which he spent nearly three decades coaxing into celluloid reality, carries the weight of a career summation.

Miraculously, that weight doesn’t crush the movie; it exalts it. Filmmakers have choked on all-consuming passion projects before, and Scorsese, who spent another quarter-century struggling to bring “Gangs of New York” to the screen, knows all too well the difficulties of spinning grand personal ambitions into popular art. In “Silence,” a work of good faith in every sense, you feel the passion but none of the strain. It’s remarkable how absorbingly, and indelibly, its story takes shape before our eyes.

Rodrigues and Garrpe arrive in Japan hoping to revive a ministry that has been driven underground, and also to locate the physical and spiritual whereabouts of Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a veteran priest who is rumored to have done the unthinkable and apostatized, or renounced his faith. And as the two men minister to Japanese believers in secret, Rodrigues — played by Garfield with a galvanizing swirl of doubt and conviction — becomes the movie’s conflicted center, though he could scarcely be considered its hero.

The great deliverance that Rodrigues envisions for himself, through either his success or his glorious martyrdom, is a vain delusion that will be steadily chipped away — by the cruel, sadistic interrogation of the local authorities, but also by the doubt and despair that have taken root in his heart.

Working with such sterling past collaborators as editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Scorsese has done more than resurrect a vision of feudal Japan, wreathed in mist and caked in state-of-the-art period grime. (The film was shot entirely in Taiwan, on 35mm film.) He has come to trust his material on an instinctual level; “Silence” feels less like a feat of adaptation than an act of artistic submission.

At times the camera holds with mournful solemnity on the torments endured by Japanese Christians — three of whom we see crucified at sea, while others are burned alive or dangled over a pit for hours on end — but any sense of revelry in this horrific spectacle is entirely absent. Gone, too, is the director’s swaggering formal bravado; everything extraneous seems to have been pared away. In embracing the irreducible simplicity of Endō’s language and slowing his own narrative rhythms accordingly, Scorsese has conjured a portrait of unbearable suffering that is also a work of insistent, altogether confounding grace.

The searing honesty of the director’s approach demands a no less candid spirit on the part of this critic and fellow believer: Endō’s novel wrecked me when I read it three years ago, for both its consolation and its challenge. It struck me then as both a wrenching affirmation of a savior’s unfathomable grace and a thorough dismantling of everything that Christianity has often aligned itself with across the centuries: the arrogant pursuit of its own power and authority, and a willingness to do harm in the name of one who stood for unconditional mercy.

Scorsese’s film continues that dismantling, brilliantly and unsparingly. It’s not often that Hollywood gives us a Christian-themed movie with no particular interest in preaching to either the unconverted or the choir. With ruthless wit and an incisive grasp of cultural and theological nuance, “Silence” subverts the familiar narrative of imperialist conquest and lays waste to the conventional Hollywood wisdom of East bowing to West.

In particular, Scorsese grants his Japanese characters the full measure of their vivid, thorny humanity — something he manages with no small help from some exceptional acting talent. The personal stakes are etched with plain, piercing eloquence in the faces of two village elders, Ichizo (Yoshi Oida) and Mokichi (Shinya Tsukamoto), who are forced to participate in a humiliating act of apostasy by trampling on a fumi-e , an icon bearing the likeness of Christ.

That particular blasphemy will play out again and again, often performed by the treacherous, pathetic Kichijirō (a haunting Yōsuke Kubozuka), a holy fool whose endless turmoil holds up a twisted mirror to Rodrigues’ own. At once a helpful guide and a persistent thorn in Rodrigues’ side, Kichijirō never stops pleading for the absolution he knows he needs, even as he betrays his faith again and again for the sake of survival.

If that makes Kichijirō the story’s Judas figure (if also, perhaps, its truest exemplar of Christian humility), the role of Pontius Pilate is given a malevolent comic spin by the notorious inquisitor Inoue (Issey Ogata), whose persecutions have struck terror into the hearts of Christians across Japan. Like Ferreira, whom Neeson embodies with a profound sense of defeat, and the silver-tongued interpreter (the excellent Tadanobu Asano) provided for Rodrigues’ benefit, Inoue pointedly identifies Japan as a “swamp,” a place whose feudal economy and Buddhist worldview have made it impossible for Christianity to flourish.

Even viewers who recognize Ogata from Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi” and Alexander Sokurov’s “The Sun” will be unprepared for the bracing dose of camp he injects into these severe proceedings, with his mock formality and an unnervingly high vocal pitch that suggests a Nipponese Mr. Woodchuck. It’s an audacious, beautifully judged performance, and also a jolting reminder that, for all the asceticism of the film’s subject, Scorsese the entertainer is still very much at work.

At times the director seems to channel the stark, meditative gaze of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson and other saints of European cinema, as well as the ghostly poetry of such Japanese classics as Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu.” But “Silence” isn’t, in the end, a radically austere film, or an especially difficult one. Scorsese may be pushing us into uncommonly rarefied multiplex territory — much as he did with “Kundun,” his epic portrait of the Dalai Lama — but he has no intention of leaving us in the dark.

The casting of name actors like Garfield, Driver and Neeson as Portuguese priests, speaking English in a range of accents, may represent concessions to the mainstream. But these surface inconsistencies — think of them as slightly varying translations of the same rock-solid text — are quickly subsumed in the urgency of the performances, and in the flow of a drama that gathers tremendous force over its 161-minute running time. Building implacable dread and tension from scene to scene, the story is as simple as its underlying ideas are endlessly complex.

The possible meanings of Endō’s title are infinite, and hardly limited to the historical moment that so gripped his imagination. Is God’s silence a test, or an admission of His nonexistence? What about the problem of our own silence, especially when it makes us complicit in someone else’s suffering? The dissonant closing scenes advance a still more provocative inquiry: Could silence, far from being an act of cowardice, in fact constitute the truest, most necessary expression of faith?

These questions are more easily posed than answered. As this film enters the cultural bloodstream, much will be made of its allegedly polarizing qualities, the divisions that it will draw between skeptics and believers. But “Silence” is too enormous in mind and spirit, too respectful of its own mystery, to be contained by these convenient dichotomies.

Scorsese summons every last ounce of conviction to question the very nature of conviction itself — and in the process, a movie that never insists on our faith becomes all but impossible not to believe in.

------------

In English and Japanese with English subtitles

MPAA rating: R, for some disturbing violent content

Running time: 2 hours, 41 minutes

Playing: ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood, and the Landmark Theatre, West Los Angeles

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Movie Review: ‘Silence’

  By John Mulderig

Catholic News Service

NEW YORK – Directed and co-written (with Jay Cocks) by Martin Scorsese, “Silence” (Paramount) is a dramatically powerful but theologically complex work best suited to viewers who come to the multiplex prepared to engage with serious issues.

Those willing to make such an intellectual investment, however, will find themselves richly rewarded.

In adapting Catholic author Shusaku Endo’s 1966 fact-based historical novel, a project in the works since the late 1980s, Scorsese finds himself in what might be called Graham Greene territory. As fans of that British novelist know, he had a fondness for stretching and twisting fundamental issues of faith and morality, and Endo’s plot shows the same tendency. So this is also not a film for the poorly catechized.

The movie’s primary setting is 17th-century Japan, where persecution is raging against the previously tolerated Christian community.

Shocked by rumors that Christavao Ferreira (Liam Neeson), their mentor in the priesthood, has renounced the faith under torture, two of his fellow Jesuits, Sebastian Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), volunteer to leave the safety of Europe for the perils of the Land of the Rising Sun. Their twin goals are to find their role model and to minister to the underground Japanese church.

What follows is a long, sometimes harrowing battle between doubt and human frailty on the one hand and fidelity on the other. Earthly compassion is set against faithfulness and an eternal perspective, with both divine and human silence contributing to the appropriateness of the title.

Scorsese has crafted an often visually striking drama that’s also deeply thought-provoking and emotionally gripping. And the performances are remarkable all around. But the paradoxes of the narrative demand careful sifting by mature moviegoers well-grounded in their beliefs.

Those lacking such a foundation could be led astray, drawing the conclusion that mercy toward the suffering of others can sometimes justify sin. While Catholics who are blessed with the freedom to practice their faith in peace are hardly in a position to judge those facing martyrdom, the principle that circumstances can mitigate guilt but not transform wrong into right remains universally valid.

In the end, “Silence” movingly vindicates a certain form of constancy. That may, in a roundabout way, match the historical record: There is edifying, though inconclusive, evidence that the real person behind one of the three main characters in the picture not only rejected his previous apostasy, but ultimately surrendered his life for the faith.

The film contains religious themes requiring mature discernment, much violence, including scenes of gruesome torture and a brutal, gory execution, as well as rear and partial nudity. The Catholic News Service classification is L – limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R – restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Mulderig is on the staff of Catholic News Service.

Copyright ©2016 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.  

The Catholic Review is the official publication of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

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‘Silence’ Review: Martin Scorsese’s Jesuit Drama Is a Religious Experience

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Is God dead – and if not, why does he appear to be deaf, blind and dumb in the face of human suffering? That’s a deep dive for any one movie, yet Martin Scorsese’s Silence fearlessly takes the plunge, emerging in a dizzying climb that offers frustratingly few answers but all the right questions. The filmmaker, raised Roman Catholic and inculcated in its rituals, has tackled the issue of faith before, both directly ( The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun ) and implicitly ( Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Cape Fear ), works in which belief erupts in bloodshed. This tale of Jesuit priests has been called Scorsese’s passion project – a misnomer, since this great American artist has yet to make a film he wasn’t passionate about. What’s meant here is that the 74-year-old director has been trying to get Silence on screen since the late Eighties, when he first read the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese convert to Catholicism who found something profound in the story of Portuguese missionaries who risked their lives to bring the word of God to 17th-century Japan.

That’s the plot on which Scorsese pins the spiritual quest of his urgent, unforgettable movie. Andrew Garfield , his eyes alive with fervor, plays Father Sebastião Rodrigues. Adam Driver , his starved body resembling an ascetic saint, costars as Father Francisco Garupe. Through these fierce, fully committed performances, we journey east with the young priests in search of their missing mentor Father Cristovao Ferreira ( Liam Neeson ). Is he in hiding, executed or married and living in sin as a Buddhist? The last option fills them with dread. Inexperienced in the ways of religious persecution, Rodrigues and Garupe find Japan a shock to their system. The brutal feudal lords and ruling samurai are committed to flushing out hidden Christians, converts who can save themselves only by stepping on a fumie, a crudely carved image of Christ. Resistance can result in drowning, burning, crucifixion or being cut, hung upside down over a pit and slowly bled to death. Scorsese, who wrote the script with Jay Cocks ( The Age of Innocence ), doesn’t wallow in these violent visuals, using them only to reflect the horror of priests who are told that by trampling on a fumie themselves they can save the lives of others.

The introduction of doubt, especially in Rodrigues, is a theme that propels the film, two hours and forty minutes of challenging spirituality that won’t be easy to sell to a popular audience wary of stepping outside the Marvel Comic Universe. Scorsese is daring us to examine our own feelings about faith and redemption. Neeson, who opens up his character fully in the film’s final third, is remarkable at showing how Father Ferreira reconciles conviction and doubt about a God who chooses to suffer with mankind instead of ending its suffering. Shot in Taiwan with a poet’s eye by the gifted Rodrigo Prieto ( The Wolf of Wall Street ), the film Is a technical and soulful marvel. If you want proof that editing can be an art form, watch what longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker does with the arrangement of images that provoke thoughtful debate.

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All the performances are first-rate, with particular praise due the Japanese actors. Yosuke Kubozuka is outstanding as Kichijiro, a Judas figure who wants to help the priests but continuously betrays them to save his own skin. There is well-deserved Oscar buzz for the brilliant Issey Ogata as Inoue, the villainous Inquisitor whose sly wit speaks to the political side of his spiritual decisions. It’s Inoue who orders the crucifixion of three Christian villagers on a beach, each choking back water as the tide comes in. Like many scenes in Silence, this one is filled with beauty and terror, addressing a silent God against an exquisite background of nature that asserts the existence of a higher power.

At times Garfield’s beleaguered priest hears Christ talking through him: “Trample. It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world.” Is it delusion, compassion or self-justification? Scorsese has said that Silence is “about the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience.” There is no doubting the film’s relevance to a modern world in which fundamentalism and religious extremism are on the rise. Scorsese, with a rigorous fix on the complexity of his subject, refuses to temper the film’s harshness with sermonizing or sentiment. Heaven and hell, brute nature and healing grace all have a place in forging faith as Scorsese sees it.

Sure, he’s overreaching. Most visionaries do. The fate of this film will depend on what it does or doesn’t open up in you. The issues it raises aren’t meant to go down easy. But no one with a genuine belief in the possibilities and mysteries of cinema would think of missing Silence. It’s essential filmmaking from the church of Scorsese, a modern master who lives and breathes in the images he puts on screen.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, silence, guilt, christ and martin scorsese.

In his book But What if We’re All Wrong ?, Chuck Klosterman asks a lot of questions. From whether our contemporary understanding of physics is all wrong to whether we’ve missed it on the literary geniuses of our time, he suggests that what we think we know now might just not be true in, say, 100 years; Klosterman explores what modern culture will look like in hindsight—as a thing of the past.

With the release of Martin Scorsese ’s highly-anticipated “Silence,” what could easily go down as one of Scorsese’s greatest—or at least one of his most personal—achievements yet, I think it’s worth asking these same sorts of questions of the renowned Italian-American director. Scorsese, of course, has already cemented his place in film history as an all-time great. So, a more interesting question might be this: In the centuries to come, will we look back at Scorsese as not only one of the most prolific filmmakers of this era, but also as one of the most distinctly Catholic? Despite a body of work marked by sex, drugs and blood, will we view Scorsese in the same vein as a Flannery O’Connor—an artist and storyteller so haunted by Christ that he can’t help but show it all throughout his work?

A Catechism of Film

Raised in New York City, Scorsese experienced a childhood unlike that of most kids, suffering from severe asthma and relying heavily on regular medication. Unable to play sports or run around with the neighborhood kids, he ended up spending most of his time in either the church or the cinema. These were the places he found solace from the gritty streets of Little Italy and where he was catechized—where his convictions and aspirations merged and formed.

Even though Scorsese’s immediate family was not religious, he took a different direction given his unique circumstances. His schooling at Old St. Patrick elementary school and a high-school-level seminary called Cathedral Prep not only turned him into a devout altar boy but also a young man who dreamed of one day becoming a missionary priest in the Philippines.

Yet, at the same time Scorsese’s delved deeper into religion, his love for cinema furthered—in some ways these things were always intertwined. In fact, it was a local parish priest who introduced him to serious movies. Spending as much time in the seat of a theater than on his knees at an altar, Scorsese became enthralled with the world of cinema. As a student, Scorsese drew inspiration from the Catholic liturgy, namely the sacred practices of Holy Week. In turns out that Scorsese had aspirations of adapting the Stations of the Cross into a script someday—he evidently settled for “The Last Temptation of the Christ” as his source material to tell the gospel story on screen instead.

By the time he was ready to attend college, Scorsese found himself at NYU to study film and English when he couldn’t get into a Fordham University—a Catholic school run by Jesuit priests—because of bad grades. While forging a filmmaking career in college, Scorsese still envisioned himself ending up at a seminary someday.

Though he never went on to get more theological education and now considers himself a lapsed Catholic because of his multiple divorces and other reasons, Scorsese developed a distinctly Catholic imagination in spending over a decade and a half in Catholic schools—and this Catholic way of seeing the world has stuck with him ever since.

Sacramental Cinema

Examining the Catholicism of Scorsese’s films, Richard A. Blake notes that “Scorsese’s attention to physical detail, if understood as a function of his Catholic imagination, holds an importance that is somewhat different from the same visual care exercised by other successful filmmakers. In any effective cinema, images invariably set a mood, reveal a character, or even contain symbolic meanings. For Scorsese, the Catholic, such details frequently reveal a spiritual reality embodied in the material universe.”

For Catholics, the sacraments exist as outward symbols and embodiments of invisible grace, from baptism to penance to the Holy Eucharist. As  the New Advent Catholic encyclopedia states, “the sacraments of the Christian dispensation are not mere signs; they do not merely signify Divine grace, but in virtue of their Divine institution, they cause that grace in the souls of men.” Not only that, but in spite of setting apart the official sacraments of the Church, Catholics see the whole world as sacramental—a material world enchanted by the divine.

Given his background, specifically a childhood marked by distinctly Catholic rituals and practices, the sacramental consequentially consumes the films of Scorsese. Through shots and scenes with religious references and iconography , his style is the substance of worlds haunted by Christ—where the secular embodies the sacred. 

The crucifix, particularly, shows up time and time again in Scorsese’s body of work. Whether it be physical crosses in churches and homes, a cross tattoo on the back of Max Cady in “ Cape Fear ,” corpses positioned like a crucifix in “ Boxcar Bertha ,” “ Gangs of New York ” and “ The Departed ,” or the literal cross of Christ in “The Last Temptation,” this central Christian symbol makes its way into most Scorsese’s films—whatever the subject matter. The visual use of the crucifix expresses a sense of Catholic guilt and a longing for faith. It also affirms a vision of life where as dark and dire as things might be, the love of Christ is still somehow present.

Scorsese’s sacramental style, of course, goes beyond the more obvious symbol of the cross; it emerges through a number of other visuals, such as icons and candles. In a few particular works, Scorsese seems to invoke medieval religious art through the deliberate use of lighting. In religious iconography of the Middle Ages, many figures are depicted with halos—a ring of light around them. While this element can mean different things, it generally signifies a sense of God’s presence through said figures; they are believed to be illuminated by glory and grace and, in turn, they illuminate the world around them. Whether it be Charlie ( Harvey Keitel ) in “ Mean Streets ” or Frank ( Nicholas Cage ) in “Bringing out the Dead,” Scorsese lights these characters—individuals who, despite their morals flaws, function like modern saints—in the same vein, setting them apart as conduits of the divine.

While Scorsese tends to use literal Christian symbols and elements, all his movies—even those not overtly religious—prove to be sacramental, particularly in the way he decorates the backgrounds and foregrounds of various scenes. Scorsese’s images don’t merely reflect his Catholic faith, but they also reflect a Catholic sensibility that sees the spiritual beyond the material.

Redemption by Blood

Of all the sacramental imagery within Scorsese’s work, the most prominent element comes in the form of blood. Indeed, if there is anything Scorsese is known for, it’s violence—even his tamer pictures have their fair share of gore. Scorsese, of course, doesn’t delve into violence for the sake of violence, though he’s certainly been accused of such exploitation; he instead uses it to explore the greater theme of redemption. The same could be said about the other gritty aspects of his films—you know, all those F-words.

In Catholicism—and Christianity broadly—blood is a fundamental element and symbol. Throughout the whole of Scripture, blood functions as a means of cleansing and atonement. In the Christian story, redemption requires blood—the sacrifice of life. This idea obviously comes to a head at the cross of Christ and, thus, in the sacrament of the Eucharist, where Catholics receive this sacrifice by partaking in the flesh and blood of Christ.

While many of Scorsese’s films don’t even mention faith or religion outright, a sense of morality and spirituality is implied in the angst felt in his characters and stories, which becomes channeled through means of bloodshed. Some make more progress than others, but to a degree, all Scorsese’s protagonists find themselves on a quest for redemption. Unlike other characters of film and literature who appear either apathetic or ignorant toward their licentiousness, Scorsese’s boast both an awareness and a desire to right their wrongs or the wrongs of others, in whatever dark and twisted way it might be—even the sacrifice of life.

Scholar Arturo Serrano sees the theme of redemption in all Scorsese’s characters, from J.R. in “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” to Henry in “ GoodFellas ” to Howard Hughes in “ The Aviator ” to Teddy in “ Shutter Island ,” specifically as it relates to the religious symbols of blood and fire: “This search for redemption usually involves the character going through a violent process to cleanse himself of his faults. Sometimes this takes the form of physical cleansing elements, such as blood in the case of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and fire in Casino.”

While clearly most evident in “The Last Temptation,” this idea of baptism by blood emerges quite prominently in “ Raging Bull ,” the gritty biopic of Italian-American middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta. Though it’s been debated whether LaMotta finds redemption by the end of the narrative, his character undoubtedly seeks it all throughout the story, specifically in the bloody and sweaty ritual of the boxing ring. One scene in particular sums up this idea: When after pushing away his wife and his brother, Jake takes to the ring, and upon being sponged in his own blood, the camera pans on a striking image of blood dripping from the rope; this scene calls to mind the notion of sacrament and, ultimately, the cross.

In Scorsese’s films, blood and redemption are inherently connected, yet with a few pictures aside, these characters never achieve redemption in the end—not true redemption anyway. On the contrary, the blood and violence in Scorsese’s films shows the bleak results of men taking divine matters into their own hands, and in that, they subversively point toward the blood and violence of Christ.

Guilt and a Battle of Spirit and Flesh

Despite Catholicism showing up in his entire body of work, Scorsese’s most explicitly spiritual films are more scarce and spread out across his career. In many ways, these films juxtapose the crux of the Scorsese canon—the violent and bloody films that feature failed attempts at redemption. They are personal outworkings of faith—a wrestle between sacred and secular, a battle of spirit and flesh. They are confessions of Catholic guilt. Scorsese, himself, once admitted , “The most important legacy of my Catholicism is guilt. A major helping of guilt, like garlic.”

Scorsese’s third feature film, “Mean Streets,” is about this very thing—guilt. “Mean Streets” takes the topic head-on with a young gangster—Charlie—caught in the middle of two lives: promised prosperity in an obligation to work for his criminal uncle and a firm commitment to Catholicism. In an opening voiceover, Charlies muses, "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it on the streets. You do it at home." Throughout the film, Charlie finds himself in moral dilemma after moral dilemma, confession after confession; he is pulled back and forth between two worlds, two lives. Knowing Scorsese’s upbringing and desire to be a priest and the path he took instead, it’s not difficult to see him in the character of Charlie—overcome by guilt, unable to shake the faith that shaped him.

Fifteen years later, Scorsese went on to make his most controversial and his most religious film to date: “ The Last Temptation of Christ ,” an adaptation of the famous novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. While the film divided a number of Christian viewers because of the way it graphically expressed Christ’s humanity—namely a sequence where Jesus dreams of marrying and having sex with Mary Magdalene—it was deeply personal for Scorsese. For the acclaimed director, the film was an expression of guilt and faith, the ultimate battle of spirit and flesh; Scorsese said he made the film because he wanted to know Jesus more. 

“The Last Temptation” may not be theologically or biblically accurate and, thus, may be blasphemous by Christian standards, but it depicts the life of Christ in a way no movie has before: as a human being who suffered physically, emotionally and spiritually, making the final words of Christ all the more powerful: “It is finished.” As an artist haunted by Christ, Scorsese remarked of the film in an interview: “I made it as a prayer, an act of worship.”

After a successful string of violent gangster films in the ‘90s, including “GoodFellas” and “ Casino ,” Scorsese surprised everyone with the quiet and meditative “ Kundun ,” a film about nonviolence, religious ritual and the life of the 14th Dalai Lama. Though “Kundun” obviously deals with Buddhism versus Catholicism, it still speaks to Scorsese’s obsession with the spiritual—a yearning for grace and peace.

It’s no surprise then that Scorsese followed “Kundun” with the incredibly spiritual “ Bringing Out the Dead .” Starring Nicholas Cage as a New York City paramedic, this film makes a perfect counterpart to Scorsese’s more famous “ Taxi Driver ,” which despite also being instilled with Catholic symbols and themes feels less resolved. Both films center on lonely, tormented men who scurry the streets of the Big Apple in search of redemption, yet whereas “Taxi Driver” focuses on retaliation and retribution, “Bringing Out the Dead” focuses on healing and salvation. Even though he’s a miserable alcoholic, Cage’s Frank is full of love and mercy. Like Scorsese, he’s a man torn between two selves, motivated by both spirit and flesh.

There are other Scorsese films that look at Catholic guilt thematically, including “Gangs of New York” and “The Departed,” where a few characters among many seem to struggle with matters of moral conviction and conscience amid lives of crime and violence, as well as “Living in the Material World,” a documentary about the spiritual journey of George Harrison . And, as already explored, each and every one of Scorsese’s films has residuals of a Catholic imagination, whether big or small. That said, Scorsese’s Catholicism can be easy to miss since he has only taken on religion overtly in a few pictures, including the most recent “Silence.”

The Culmination of Silence

Given his religious roots and connection to Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name, Scorsese wanted to make “Silence” for almost 30 years. And, while many would have preferred an earlier release, now that the film is here, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Scorsese said in a recent interview with the  New York Times that it was “All in God’s time … It had to be this way.” It makes sense; the film wouldn’t be the same if it hadn’t taken this long. Built upon a filmmaking legacy that spans half a century, “Silence” marks the culmination of Scorsese’s career—not only technically and stylistically, but also religiously; it seamlessly encapsulates the Catholic imagination that’s informed his work from film school until now.

A story about two Portuguese Jesuit priests, played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver , who travel to Japan to look for their mentor and, in turn, suffer for their faith, “Silence” seems to be a film about religious persecution or ethical dilemmas. Upon their arrival, the young priests witness firsthand the horrors of being a Christian in this hostile country as they are given the choice of torture—personally and for their Japanese brothers and sisters—or apostasy. But, even though the film delves into these topics, it proves less about ethics and suffering and more about the very thing that Scorsese’s explored throughout his body of work: Catholic guilt.

Throughout his new film, Scorsese draws upon the same symbols and elements present in his works of old, from crucifixes in all shapes and sizes to the element of blood. He not only offers a few grandiose shots of the heavens that juxtapose a spiritual world with a material world where God has supposedly been outlawed, but he also returns to a use of lighting that, in the vein of religious medieval art, ties characters to the divine.

“Silence” may seem like a story about apostasy—and for that reason, some Christians might miss it and unfortunately write it off—but it’s really a story about grace. It’s a film about how, for some, no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you reject him, the body and blood of Christ will still be available.

Now that “Silence” is here, three decades later, it’s more than obvious why Scorsese latched onto Endo’s novel and wanted to make this film in the first place. In the character of Rodrigues, Scorsese finds a man with whom he deeply relates and resonates. Scorsese, the lapsed Catholic, may not actively practice his faith, and he may not line up with all the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church, but like Rodrigues, his Catholicism will never really leave him—Christ will always haunt him. As Scorsese said in a panel for “Bringing out the Dead,” “I'm a lapsed Catholic. But I am Roman Catholic—there's no way out of it.”

A Catholic Artist and Legacy

Martin Scorsese may not be Catholic in the way that Flannery O’Connor was. Unlike Scorsese, O’Connor evidently stayed devout her entire life and never lapsed. In other words, she died receiving the sacraments, but at some point in his life, Scorsese stopped. He no longer falls in line with where he did 60 years, when he wanted to become a missionary to Asia. Yet, when putting personal details aside, both feature body of works that, despite dealing with the gritty and grotesque, are filled with Christian images and symbols, exploring themes such as faith, suffering and guilt.

But because Scorsese makes such popular movies and because, as Klosterman rightfully points out, we don’t see things the same way in the present, it’s hard to imagine Scorsese as not just one of the greatest directors to ever live, but as also one of the greatest Catholic artists to ever live. That said, upon a closer look of the filmmaker and his films, it might just be the case. As Scorsese once noted, “ My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.”

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Film Review: Martin Scorsese’s ‘Silence’

Martin Scorsese rounds out his trilogy of faith-focused epics with this challenging, yet beautiful spiritual journey.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Only in the real world do humans possess free will, whereas any film about the nature of belief effectively requires the director to play God, forcing them to answer the very questions they often set out to raise. Despite this paradox, in the history of cinema, there have been many great films about Christian faith — though not nearly enough: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Ordet,” Robert Bresson’s “The Diary of a Country Priest,” Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Léon Morin, Priest.” Now, add to that Martin Scorsese ’s “ Silence ,” which marks the culmination of a nearly 30-year journey to adapt Japanese novelist Shūsaku Endō’s tale of a 17th-century Jesuit missionary faced with the dilemma of whether to apostatize.

And yet, judged in broadly cinematic terms, “Silence” is not a great movie, despite having been directed by one of the medium’s greatest masters at a point of great maturity (this is the last film one might expect to immediately follow the bacchanalian excess of “The Wolf of Wall Street”). Though undeniably gorgeous, it is punishingly long, frequently boring, and woefully unengaging at some of its most critical moments. It is too subdued for Scorsese-philes, too violent for the most devout, and too abstruse for the great many moviegoers who such an expensive undertaking hopes to attract (which no doubt explains why Scorsese was compelled to cast “The Amazing Spider-Man” actor Andrew Garfield and two “Star Wars” stars).

Still, viewed through the narrow prism of films about faith, “Silence” is a remarkable achievement, tackling as it does a number of Big Questions in a medium that, owing to its commercial nature, so often shies away from Christianity altogether. Considering the dominant role religious belief plays in the lives of so many, it’s surprising, even scandalous, that so few films face the subject head-on. “Silence” is the largest, most serious-minded examination of faith since Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” rounding out a trilogy on the subject from the director of “Kundun” and “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

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At the core of “Silence” lies the dilemma: What does it mean to apostatize? Though the screenplay (which Scorsese adapted with Jay Cocks, his collaborator on “The Age of Innocence” and “Gangs of New York”) intends for us to consider this question on some deep teleological level, the film would do well to engage with it first in more literal terms. For those not already versed in the finer points of Christian dogma, “apostasy” is the act by which someone renounces his faith, represented in the particular context of this film by placing one’s foot upon a fumi-e (or religious carving of Mary or Jesus). Here, apostasy is the weapon by which 17th-century Japanese officials, threatened by European colonial powers and the missionary faith they brought with them, sought to combat the spread of Christianity among peasants receptive to the notion that their suffering might be lifted in heaven.

In Scorsese’s comparably low-key “Kundun,” the future Dalai Lama learns the Four Noble Truths of Buddhist teaching. “What are the causes of suffering?” his teacher asks, to which his pupil responds, “Pride. Pride causes suffering.” This is a priceless insight, and one that Garfield’s character, a presumptuous young “padre” named Sebastião Rodrigues, might do well to learn. Though Rodrigues imagines his greatest obstacle to be God’s silence (he prays constantly, and yet He never responds), the story hinges on the character’s seemingly unbreakable arrogance — a dimension significantly downplayed in Garfield’s self-effacing performance. Instead, the actor focuses on Rodrigues’ doubt, as reflected in the dense clouds of fog and mist that permeate much of the film.

If “Apocalypse Now” was a modern twist on “Heart of Darkness,” then “Silence” could fairly be viewed as Scorsese’s own take on that paradigm. Call it “Soul of Murkiness.” Together with another Portuguese priest, Francisco Garrpe (Driver, who looks the part, his lean, angular face reflecting the severity of classic religious icons), Rodrigues petitions his Jesuit superior (Ciarán Hinds) to let them travel to Japan to investigate the fate of their mentor, father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson) — who’s effectively the film’s AWOL Kurtz. Their only clue is a long-delayed letter, which tells of unspeakable torture practices visited upon Christian priests and converts alike in an attempt to discourage the spread of the religion, coupled with rumors that Ferreira ultimately apostatized and now lives with a wife as a Japanese.

For the sincerely devout Rodrigues, the mission represents an opportunity to do good, offering salvation to the savages, but also a shot at glory. He makes the journey — which, in a two-hour-and-41-minute movie, passes in the blink of an eye — in full awareness that he could be martyred for his actions. With martyrdom comes divine reward (including the possibility of special visions, a privileged place in heaven, and eventual sainthood), and in Endō’s novel at least, he yearns for the opportunity.

The reality that awaits Rodrigues and Garrpe is every bit as hellish as they had imagined, and then some, and Scorsese renders these scenes of torture — boiling water drizzled over exposed flesh, women wrapped in straw and set on fire — with the same unflinching detachment Pier Paolo Pasolini did the sadism of his infamous, incendiary final film, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.” And yet, Rodrigues persists, consciously risking his safety in order to locate and serve the “Kakure Kirishitan” (or “hidden Christians”), who have been forced underground by these terrible punishments, inquiring as to Ferreira’s whereabouts with each fresh encounter.

The first Japanese the missionaries encounter is a wily ex-Christian named Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), whose sneaky, social-outcast behavior suggests the way Toshiro Mifune might play the role of Gollum. Kichijiro has apostatized once already, and he will again before the movie ends, repeatedly betraying his faith and returning to beg forgiveness. Generally speaking, the casting of the Japanese characters favors actors who look like ghoulish exaggerations — like the rude caricatures found in Tintin comics, their teeth and fingernails smeared in grime. Compared with the humanely depicted natives of Roland Joffe’s more conventionally accessible/satisfying “The Mission,” the Japanese here come across as frighteningly “other,” almost animalistic. An unnerving inquisitor named Inoue (Issey Ogata) has a wheedling voice and faux-gracious manner that suggests the Japanese equivalent of Christoph Waltz’s Nazi colonel in “Inglourious Basterds.”

This style of representation marks a troubling, but no doubt deliberate choice on Scorsese’s part — especially compared with Garfield’s bare-chested, fabulously coiffed Rodrigues. Underscoring where our sympathies are expected to lie, the missionary outsiders all speak English (with wildly varied Portuguese accents), while the comparably heathen locals communicate in subtitled Japanese. Unlike Endō’s own big-screen adaptation of his novel, filmed by Japanese director Masahiro Shinoda in 1971, here, the local becomes the “other” — especially since the second half of the film concerns the two priests’ captivity and the sadistic attempts to convince them that Japan is a “swamp” where their religion “does not take root.”

Rodrigues is prepared for martyrdom, but not for the Japanese inquisitor’s more diabolical scheme, which involves torturing other Christians until he apostatizes. Worse still, Rodrigues watches as his cohort achieves the martyrdom he seeks (in a horrific beachfront scene that rings strangely hollow). Through it all, Rodrigues continues his appeal to God, praying for guidance, but receiving only … silence. Until he doesn’t.

The film’s last hour is by far its most challenging, as Scorsese goes out of his way to avoid some of the sweeping, free-associative techniques Malick has innovated for spiritual cinema, turning instead to the austere model of Bresson, Dreyer, and others that “Last Temptation” screenwriter Paul Schrader once described as “transcendental cinema,” in which powerless protagonists struggle against forces beyond their control. Whereas Endō’s novel allows omniscient access to Rodrigues’ deep internal conflict, the film leaves audiences at arm’s length, forcing us to scrutinize Garfield’s face for psychological insights that, for most, are too complex to expect us to interpret on our own.

For non-believers in particular, when Neeson resurfaces, his arguments, intended as the cruelest temptation, will instead sound perfectly logical. What Ferreira describes as “the most powerful act of love that has ever been performed” feels like a no-brainer, with no catharsis to ease the anti-climax. From the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition, when one considers all the cruelty that religion has exerted on the world, it seems almost unfair to focus on this footnote in world history, where priests were punished for their beliefs, the way early Christians were thrown to the lions.

And yet, these paradoxes surely aren’t lost on Scorsese, who has created a taxing film that will not only hold up to multiple viewings, but practically demands them. Here, as ever, he brings an arresting visual sense to the project, reteaming with production designer Dante Ferretti and DP Rodrigo Prieto to create evocative widescreen tableaux, shot on celluloid and shrouded in mist and shadow, while relaxing some of his flashier techniques (with its Peter Gabriel score and aggressive cutting, “Last Temptation” feels dated today in a way that the director clearly intends to avoid here). What little music “Silence” does contain is featured so faintly as to be almost subliminal, leaving ample room for engaged audiences to personalize the viewing experience, while frustrating those grasping for clues as to the precise emotional reaction Scorsese intends. That’s a risky move, as is the dramatic way he breaks the silence in the end. Those who put their faith in Scorsese may find it challenged as never before by his long-gestating passion project.

Reviewed at Paramount studios, Nov. 30, 2016. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 161 MIN.

• Production: (U.S.-Taiwan-Mexico) A Paramount Pictures release of a SharpSword Films, AI Film presentation, in association with CatchPlay, IM Global, Verdi Prods., of an EFO Films, YLK, G&G, Sikelia, Fábricia de Cine production. Producers: Martin Scorsese, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Randall Emmett, Barbara De Fina, Gastón Pavlovich, Irwin Winkler, Vittorio Cecchi Gori, David Lee. Executive producers: Dale A. Brown, Matthew J. Malek, Manu Gargi, Tyler Zacharia, Ken Kao, Dan Kao, Niels Juul, Chad A. Verdi, Len Blavatnik, Aviv Giladi, Lawrence Bender, Stuart Ford. Co-producers: David Webb, Marianne Bower, Eriko Miyagawa, Diane Sabatini.
• Crew: Director: Martin Scorsese. Screenplay: Scorsese, Jay Cocks, based on the novel by Shūsaku Endō. Camera (color, widescreen): Rodrigo Prieto. Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker.
• With: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Ciarán Hinds, Issey Ogata, Shinya Tsukamoto, Yoshi Oida, Yosukey Kubozuka, Liam Neeson. (English, Japanese, Latin dialogue)

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• Review: Scorsese’s Gorgeous, Haunting <em>Silence</em> Maps the Space Between Faith and Doubt

Review: Scorsese’s Gorgeous, Haunting Silence Maps the Space Between Faith and Doubt

F aith, boring and virtuous, is the dirge. Doubt is the thing that swings. And the hushed energy of doubt that drives Silence , Martin Scorsese’s radiant exploration of what it means to believe in the grace of God, or of anything.

Silence is most easily categorized as a “religious” movie, and it’s certainly of a piece with Scorsese’s other pictures about belief and spirituality, The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, both of which rank among his finest yet also most underappreciated work. But Silence —adapted from Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name, about Portuguese Jesuit missionaries facing persecution in 17th century Japan—works on so many levels, and is so hauntingly beautiful to look at, that no one should be turned off by the Jesus angle. Silence is something to see whether you’re certain there’s a God or whether you just believe in sunlight, which covers just about everybody.

Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver play Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe, Jesuit missionaries from Portugal who volunteer, fervently, to travel to Japan, where Christians are being persecuted. They’ve received news that their mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira ( Liam Neeson ), who had been doing missionary work in the country, has caved in to pressure from the Japanese authorities and apostatized—in other words, disavowed his faith. Might they be able to find him? They pack up their almost nonexistent belongings— Jesuits travel light —and begin their long journey, making a stop in Macau to pick up the rapscallion guide who has been chosen for them, Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka).

What they find when they reach Japan both defies their expectations and unnerves them: The devout Christian peasants who greet them—people who have been almost literally driven underground for their forbidden faith—can hardly believe this blessing, that they finally have genuine priests in their midst. Rodrigues and Garrpe are stunned by the depth of the locals’ commitment and at first worry that they might not be able to meet these mountainous expectations. But Rodrigues warms to the job fairly quickly; Garrpe is the one whose anxiety never fully dissipates, and whose nerves begin to fray after too many days in the small hut where the two are kept in hiding, unable to venture out during daylight.

One day, after Rodrigues, too, succumbs to cabin fever, the two sneak out to sun themselves on a rock. The scene is a gentle, almost imperceptible dramatic pivot: As they soak up the glory of natural light, they notice two peasants, unknown to them, staring in their direction. Framed by branches, half obscured by swirls of mist, these figures are a mystery, a promise, a warning of suffering to come. The sight of them, ghosts made of flesh and blood, is so visually bewitching that it seems to stop time.

Silence is deeply attuned to the natural world, almost pagan in its fervid depiction of ruggedly gorgeous seashores and quasi-mystical leafy forests, courtesy of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (who has worked with Scorsese once before, on The Wolf of Wall Street ) and Scorsese’s longtime production designer Dante Ferretti. (The picture was filmed in Taiwan.) But this is also a story told largely with faces, like that of the almost comically villainous Inoue (the marvelous, purring Issei Ogata), who attempts to grind the faithful down with logic, though he really prefer torture. There’s also Kubozuka’s anguished ne’er-do-well Kichijiro, who wears an unblinking mask that combines treachery and innocence in a kind of perverse purity. Kichijiro keeps denouncing Christianity to save his own skin, only to run back to Rodrigues for forgiveness: The turnaround time between betrayal and repentance gets shorter and shorter, becoming a kind of bitter slapstick.

And then there’s Driver, whose searching eyes and noble oblong face and could have been dreamed up by Francisco de Zurburan . The vision of Driver’s Garrpe plunging into the sea, his long cartoon limbs flailing as he strives to save a group of peasants about to be executed for their faith, is one of the film’s most lingering images.

It’s a little strange to think of a film that’s ostensibly about Christianity as one that casts a spell. But anybody who has grown up inhaling the scent of incense during mass—or believing that stabbing a consecrated host with a pencil is the surest path to Hell—understands that Catholicism, in particular, gives off a heady, otherworldly perfume. When Scorsese shows us a group of peasants apostatizing—one by one, they’re led up to a metal plate imprinted with an image of Jesus and exhorted to stomp on it—the sight of their muddy sandaled feet, sullying the sacred, induces a kind of trance like horror. Sections of Silence are difficult to watch for other reasons: Scorsese doesn’t flinch from the grisly suffering of Christian martyrs , and he trusts us to be able to face up to it, too.

Garfield’s dutiful, contemplative Rodrigues faces the most grueling trial of all. But to tell you whether he succeeds or fails would give the whole game away. Besides, the essence of Silence has nothing to do with failure or success. The nature of belief is far too variegated for that. Scorsese has wanted to make a movie out of Endo’s novel since he first read it, in 1989. In the introduction to a recently published edition of the book, he writes, “On the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other.” To that end, Silence makes no clear value judgment between belief and doubt. It’s a movie in the shape of a question mark, which may be the truest sign of the cross.

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Movie Review: Silence

A few weekends ago, my husband noticed the movie Silence while browsing Amazon Prime. I remembered hearing about this 2016 film telling the story of Jesuit missionaries in Japan. It is directed by Martin Scorsese and listed a promising cast, so we decided to spend a Sunday afternoon watching it.

The film is based on a novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō. Set in the 17th century, it tells the story of two Portuguese Jesuit priests (played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who set out for Japan in search of their mentor (played by Liam Neeson) who is rumored to have apostatized in the face of persecution.

At a port in China, they are introduced to Molkichi, a recluse of questionable trustworthiness, who will help them secretly enter Japan and meet the Christian community. 

Upon arriving in Japan, the two priests are treated as celebrities. Having gone an extended period of time without the Sacraments, the Japanese Christians are deliriously overjoyed at the arrival of the missionaries.  

The joy of the priests at being able to serve the clandestine Christians is tempered by long hours of hiding in a remote shack and dangerous travel. Soon they realize that their presence is putting the Christian communities at risk. As they witness the torture of their flock, their own faith is challenged.

The missionaries wrestle with the question of God’s seeming silence. Has he abandoned His people?

“Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of churches have fallen down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to Him, God has remained silent.” (Shūsaku Endō, Silence )

What I appreciated

Silence is a cinematographic masterpiece. There are a number of stunning nature scenes. The acting and directing are excellent. The use of lighting is superb. 

One particularly touching moment is when Padre Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) is celebrating Mass for the clandestine Christians. The sunlight peeking through the cracks fills the room. When the priest raises the host at the Consecration in front of the faithful who are attending Mass for the first time in perhaps years, my eyes filled with tears. Can I even begin to imagine their joy?

As a missionary myself, I could relate to the early zeal—and naiveté—of the young missionaries, unable to fathom the challenges that awaited them. While their desire to enter Japan was primarily to search for their mentor Padre Ferreira, they quickly fell in love with the Japanese people and desired to serve them, even putting their personal safety at risk.

I was touched by the simple, yet strong, faith of the peasant Christians and reminded of my own encounters with the simple faithful. Throughout the movie, they speak of paradise and are bolstered by the hope of heaven in the midst of brutal persecution.

When one Christian community is discovered by the government officials, three of the leaders refuse to trample on an image of Christ and deny their faith, leading to their execution. They go to their martyrdom in a manner that only men supported by God’s grace could.

God’s mercy is a theme throughout the film, particularly through the Sacrament of Confession. The first scene of Mokichi’s confession to Padre Rodrigues is particularly moving. Mokichi has need of repentance and confession over and over again, and Rodrigues offers absolution, even when the grievance hits the priest personally.

The film does not sugarcoat missionary life. Though the choices of some of the characters are questionable, the reality of what persecution and torture can do to a soul is not hidden. No one—not even a priest or missionary—is exempt from temptation, and even failure. Human nature is weak, and the movie is a stark reminder of that.

What I disliked

This is not a movie with a happy ending. In fact, it left me disappointed. The book on which the movie is based takes its plot from real-life events, so I don’t doubt the realism, at least in part. However, the ending feels inconsistent with the character development throughout the rest of the movie.

We finished the movie feeling sad. I had a pit in my stomach throughout much of it. After 2 hours and 40 minutes of a slow-paced film, I hoped to at least be left inspired, not drained.

That being said, my husband and I continued to discuss it throughout the day. It prompted some great conversation. Even if the characters’ actions left me wishing things had gone differently, I don’t regret the time I spent watching it.

This film is raw and thought-provoking. It provides a glimpse into the fortitude of persecuted Christian and the challenges of mission work in an anti-Christian country. It highlights the deep faith of the Japanese Christians and reminds us of the frailty of human nature. 

The story stirred in my own heart a greater appreciation for the access we have to the Sacraments, and reminded me that I need God’s grace to remain faithful. It prompted me to pray for missionaries and persecuted Christians around the world.

While it’s not a “pop some popcorn and relax” type of film, it is one that we as Christians and missionaries shouldn’t be afraid to watch and discuss.

The film is rated R due to the violence portrayed. It is as one would expect for a movie about persecution. There are some graphic scenes, including a beheading. Viewer discretion is advised.

Big Woods Office

Cate broadbent.

Tags: catholic church , evangelization , missionary

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Review by Brian Eggert January 9, 2017

Martin Scorsese meditates on questions of Catholic belief and apostasy in Silence , an adaptation of Japanese author Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name. Scorsese’s long-in-development passion project engages religious subject matter without artistic compromise or consideration of the film’s commercial prospects, asking questions about the contradictions of faith within a punishing historical environment. The picture recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman, most notably The Seventh Seal (1957), in which God remains mute in the face of desperate appeals from the protagonist, a Medieval knight. However, the outcome settles on a far less pleasant note, resolving, as one might expect from Scorsese, that suffering breeds understanding. There’s no question that Silence is a profoundly personal film for Scorsese, completing the director’s spiritual trilogy, after The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and his underappreciated Kundun (1997). And like those films, many will find his latest to be uncommonly restrained, ruminative, and perhaps even impenetrable.

When Scorsese visited Japan to shoot scenes as Vincent Van Gogh in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), he had the idea to adapt Endo’s novel, which had been adapted in 1971 by Japanese director Masahiro Shinoda. Scorsese had just released his controversial The Last Temptation of Christ , and the Roman Catholic author’s text must have seemed very familiar, containing many pointedly Catholic themes, which the director had explored in previous features from Mean Streets (1973) onward. After the idea to adapt Silence was born, Scorsese worked alongside scripter Jay Cocks, his writing partner on The Age of Innocence (1993) and Gangs of New York (2002), to realize his version on the screen. It comes as a somewhat ironic revelation that Scorsese finally began production after his last release, the bacchanal dark comedy The Wolf of Wall Street .

Silence takes place in seventeenth-century Japan where signs of Christianity remain after Japanese officials have suddenly banned the religion, despite decades of acceptance. After a religious cleansing in which thousands of Catholics die, so-called Kirishtans linger in rural villages and huts across the Japanese countryside, suffering interrogation and persecution from a local inquisitor named Inoue (Issey Ogata). Among those hunted, Jesuit priests willingly embrace torture by boiling water and crucifixion so they might better identify with Christ. Among them is Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who goes missing and, according to rumor, has apostatized (renounced Christianity in a public forum by stepping on an image of Jesus or the Madonna) to live a quiet life as a Japanese citizen. When word of Ferreira’s fate reaches the Portuguese colony of Macau, Ferreira’s students Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garrpe (Adam Driver) venture into Japan to locate their mentor.

Early on, the priests approach fog-laden shores, and Scorsese seems to evoke Apocalypse Now (1979). Clouds of mist and fog shroud the landscape, where Rodrigues and Garrpe are greeted by farmers who see the Jesuits as living proof that God is listening. Rodrigues insists on pushing forward after Ferreira, the film’s resident Col. Kurtz, and soon welcomes the idea of martyrdom—if only because it might mean that God speaks to him. Indeed, Rodrigues and Garrpe endure no end of desperate living on the Catholic underground, witnessing the hellish interrogation and death of several devoted followers. The worse it gets, the more Rodrigues sees mirage-like visions of Christ before him, painterly images that he seems to draw from his memory. And despite the extreme degree of suffering the Jesuits experience, God remains hushed. Elsewhere, Rodrigues falls prey to his pride and links himself to Christ, complete with his very own Judas in Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), a peasant who betrays Rodrigues to officials several times over, only to beg for forgiveness. At the same time, Inoue becomes equivalent to Pontius Pilate, an unbending, frustrated official who subjects a willing and prideful Rodrigues to horrific, albeit indirect tortures.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, Scorsese’s treatment echoes Kurosawa and Bergman, in that the director’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker probably had far fewer cuts to make than any other Scorsese film in a decade. His camera work, captured by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto in a rare rural Taiwan shoot, sprawls across the landscape in long, pensive takes. Along with the film’s scarcity of non-diegetic music, Silence contains a sobering, searching tone. It’s an elegant and relentlessly severe approach, coupled with impressive performances from Driver and Neeson, both of whom, at their worst, appear stripped-down and downright skeletal in their roles. Garfield, however, carries too modern a personality and mannerism; he’s decidedly ill-suited for a film set in the 1670s. (Example: His hair somehow remains voluminous and picture-ready, whereas Driver and Neeson seem to have the appropriate level of greasiness and filth).

With a two-hour-and-forty-minute runtime, Silence may feel like an intellectual chore, especially for those unversed in deliberately paced, faith-questioning cinema by filmmakers like Bergman, Malick, or Robert Bresson. For viewers who have faith or even question their beliefs, as Scorsese often does, the film has the potential to be a profound, deeply thoughtful, and resonating experience. Rodrigues’ desire to connect with Christ by subjecting himself to undue suffering brings about several compelling paradoxes. Why continue to force his own misery without some sort of answer to his pleas? “I pray but I’m lost. Am I just praying to silence?” he asks. For those without faith, the film may be difficult to connect with—and Ferreira’s later remarks about the earthly realm may seem appealingly logical next to Rodrigues’ often extreme, dogged faith in the first two-thirds. No matter what you believe, Scorsese’s film tests its audience with a picture that maintains an uncompromising austerity toward its purpose, yet it proves easier to appreciate than enjoy.

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Martin Scorsese’s Silence to premiere at the Vatican

Director will be joined by 400 priests for screening of film based on story of 17th-century Jesuit missionaries in Japan

There will be no red carpet, and almost certainly none of the usual glamour. But when Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence, has its world premiere at the Vatican on Tuesday, it will be the culmination of a 27-year project that the director has described as “an obsession”.

Pope Francis is not expected to attend the screening at the Pontifical Oriental Institute for the Jesuits, but Scorsese will join about 400 priests and other guests to watch the 159-minute movie. The director may meet the pontiff separately.

A two-minute trailer released this week suggested a film of much anguish and violence. It has already been tipped as an Oscar contender, an accolade for which Scorsese has been nominated a dozen times and won once, in 2007 for The Departed.

Silence is based on the acclaimed 1966 novel of the same name by the Japanese author Shusaku Endo. It is the 17th-century story of two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Rodrigues and Garrpe – played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver – who travel to Japan to track down their mentor, Father Ferreira.

At the time, Christianity was banned in Japan, and those who practised the faith were tortured and executed. Faced with this, Ferreira (played by Liam Neeson) apparently renounced his religion through a ritual known as fumie – in which Christians were forced to trample over a religious icon such as a crucifix in order to prove repudiation of their faith.

Tens of thousands of Japanese Christians were persecuted, tortured and killed over the 250 years that the religion was outlawed. The ban was lifted in 1873, but Christians are still a tiny minority – less than 1% – in a country dominated by Shinto and Buddhism.

In Silence, the two priests end up in the same situation as Ferreira. Rodrigues is forced to choose between apostasy and death – not just his own, but the execution of converts. He prays for guidance but God is silent, until at last he hears a single word: “trample”.

Scorsese read Endo’s novel in 1989, a year after his film The Last Temptation of Christ triggered a storm of controversy over a dream sequence in which Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene. Religious themes and subtexts have run through other movies made by Scorsese, who considered the priesthood as a youngster.

The director was determined to turn the novel into a movie (a Japanese film version appeared in 1971, which Endo apparently considered a travesty of his book), but the project ran into repeated difficulties and delays. Finally, filming began last year in Taiwan.

Three years ago, Scorsese told the online movie magazine Deadline that his quest to make the film had been an obsession. Saying he had been “steeped in the Roman Catholic religion” as a young man, he added: “As you get older, ideas come and go. Questions, answers, loss of the answer again and more questions, and this is what really interests me …

“Silence is just something I’m drawn to in that way. It’s been an obsession, it has to be done and now is the time to do it. It’s a strong, wonderful true story, a thriller in a way, but it deals with those questions.”

Scorsese hired the Rev James Martin, a Jesuit priest and writer, as a consultant, and his stars prepared themselves for their roles by undertaking a seven-day silent retreat at St Beuno’s, a Jesuit spiritual centre with spectacular views of Snowdonia in north Wales.

“Andrew [Garfield] got to the point where he could out-Jesuit a Jesuit,” Martin told the New York Times . “There were places in the script where he would stop and say, ‘A Jesuit wouldn’t say that’, and we would come up with something else.”

Mark Williams, professor of Japanese studies at Leeds University and an expert on Endo’s novels, said the main theme of Silence was the unique nature of each individual’s spiritual journey. “It’s difficult to get this across in a film, but if anyone can do it, it’s Scorsese,” he said.

A key test would be how the director handled the final section of the book, following the climactic scene in which Rodrigues “betrays everything his life has stood for”. In the novel, the priest is overtaken by guilt and does not abandon his faith but spends the rest of his life in and out of prison.

The book had sold well in Japan, although the “hardcore Catholic community view it as heretical and blasphemous”, said Williams.

“Endo was persona non grata among Japanese Catholics. You can’t find the book in any Christian bookshops, but it’s widely talked about in Japan – and I’m sure the film will be popular.”

Silence opens in the US on 23 December, in the UK on 1 January and in Japan later that month.

It is not the first film to have a Vatican premiere. The Pope Francis biopic Call Me Francesco was first shown there last December to an audience of refugees and homeless, and in 2006 Catherine Hardwicke’s The Nativity Story had its world premiere at the Vatican .

The Vatican has also screened films of special interest to the church, including Angelina Jolie’s prisoner of war movie, Unbroken , and Tom McCarthy’s film about sexual abuse by Catholic priests, Spotlight.

• Martin Scorsese
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Silence ends Martin Scorsese's decades-long creative quest with a thoughtful, emotionally resonant look at spirituality and human nature that stands among the director's finest works.

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Scorsese's "silence" is his most catholic film.

• Christian , Character-driven , Film Review
• 12/30/2016 2:00:00 AM
• View Count 3541

Shûsaku Endô (1923-1996) was a Japanese Catholic novelist whose extensive writings probed the conflicts and paradoxes of faith. He was born in Tokyo, lived in Manchuria, then returned to Japan and was baptized at about the age of 11. After university, he married, had a son and lived in France. The novelist Graham Greene, with whom Endo has often been compared, said he was "one of the finest living novelists" of his time.

In 1966, Endô published Silence ( Chinmoku ), a work of historical fiction about Jesuit missionaries to Japan in the 17th century. Most believe it is his masterpiece. At long last, 28 years after reading the novel, Oscar-winning director, writer, actor and producer Martin Scorsese is bringing this story to the screen.

Word reaches Portugal and then Rome that Fr. Cristóvão Ferriera (Liam Neeson), the Jesuit superior in Japan, has renounced his faith and apostatized. Many clergy and lay people have suffered martyrdom in the past few years when the authorities banished Christianity from the country and now the mission has floundered. Yet no one can believe Ferriera has apostatized and ceased to preach the Gospel. In 1635, two young Jesuit priests, Fr. Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Fr. Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver), with the permission of their superior Fr. Alessandro Valignano (Ciarán Hinds), set sail for Japan to rescue their former seminary professor and mentor. Their fervor knows no limits.

After a long voyage and stop in Goa, their ship docks in Macao where the two priests meet a Japanese man, a drunk named Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), that they hope will guide them to Japan. He will not admit to being a Christian, but he does want to go home. The priests endure hardship but press forward with a guide who seems less than trustworthy.

After another long voyage with almost nothing to their names, they arrive at an island and wade to shore. Soon enough villagers recognize the "padres" and hide them away. The priests discover that Christians are living underground, baptizing their babies and praying in secret. They learn that Kichijiro is a Christian when he asks for absolution for his apostasy that had caused him to flee Japan.

It is too much for the priests to stay hidden and they venture out. They meet Christians who are grateful for their return but fearful for the padres if they are caught. But word spreads and the authorities investigate. A cunning inquisitor, Inoue (Issei Ogata), insists that Christians make themselves known and apostatize or three will be taken and killed. Three men, one of them in his 80s, refuse to step on the image of Mother and Child. Inoue's men tie them to crosses and raise them up in the ocean where they are buffeted incessantly by the waves for days until they die. The priests watch from a cave, stunned at what their presence has provoked.

The two priests decide to separate in their search for Ferriera whom they believe is in Nagasaki. Rodrigues meets Christians and hands out all the crosses and religious items he has and even gives away the beads of his rosary, one by one. He wonders if the people have more faith in sacramentals than in Jesus.

Later, Rodrigues watches as Garrpe drowns while trying to save Christians who have been thrown into the sea wrapped in mats. Rodrigues is eventually captured and made to ride a horse through a village while the people jeer and throw stones at him. Kichijiro's fervor waxes and wanes; he denies his faith only to return for absolution that Rodrigues gives him — time and time again because he apostatizes whenever he is captured. It becomes clear to Rodrigues that the weak Kichijiro is a Judas-figure. Inoue is never far and directs the inquisition of Rodrigues, challenging the priest by saying Japan is a swamp where the Christian message cannot take root. Rodrigues, unbending, responds that the truth, whether in Europe or in Japan, is the same.

Rodrigues ministers to a small group of Christians who are jailed with him. Then Inoue threatens the priest with "the pit" torture where he, and the other Christians, will be hung upside down over an enclosed pit of excrement until death or until he apostatizes. But where, in all this, is Ferriera? And Rodrigues wonders, where is God in the suffering of the people and his own anguish? Why is God silent?

"Silence" is replete with layered human, theological, and spiritual themes that writers Jay Cocks and Scorsese imbue with respect for their subject. For those who know the book, there is time compression, and the character of Inoue is an amalgam of all the inquisitors or officials in the story. Monica, a Christian woman in the final part of the book, shows up in the early scenes. Scorsese has added something to the end of the story, the very end of the book, the inclusion of which I will leave for you to judge. The cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto is either atmospherically panoramic or intensely close-up and personal. This, along with the accomplished editing of Scorsese's frequent collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, reveals Scorsese's Catholic and sacramental imagination at its most refined, in haunting beauty. Garfield and Driver are very good, and Driver has the look of an El Greco Christ.

There are violent scenes in the film, but Scorsese stays close to the book and shows visual restraint, something that surprised me given the explicit gore in many of his previous films. Some day, when we have all processed this film, I think we will see that "Silence" marks the height of his artistry and storytelling as a Catholic filmmaker where the character of the saint and the sinner are always near.

At the top of the thematic list are faith and doubt as partners in a dangerous dance from the moment the priests first find out about Ferriera's apostasy. They leave Portugal and Rome, their gaze focused on a land far away, bolstered by a faith yet untested. Rodrigues especially carries in his heart the image of Jesus so dear to him as a child and in the seminary. Once imprisoned it comes to him in the suffering of the people and in the night. It is this Jesus with whom he converses about his doubts, his questions and the choice he faces.

The high-pitched whine of the highly intelligent and informed inquisitor Inoue, with his polite manners and saccharine but sinister smile, do not mask his intent to break the resolve of the Christians. He challenges Rodrigues, as does Ferriera when he and Rodrigues finally meet, saying that Christianity is too Western and cannot adapt to Japan. Rodrigues says that the church is the source of truth and is unable to move off the script he learned growing up in Catholic Portugal. His responses to Inoue are noble perhaps, but ineffective. The inculturation of the Gospel and adaptation, even today, remains a challenge to those who evangelize, at home or afar.

Kichijiro, absolved again and again for his apostasy, is emblematic of sinners who are self-aware of their sin and just as cognizant of God's mercy. Kichijiro disgusts Rodrigues, and it takes the priest a long time to realize that he, too, is a weak human not so different from this dirty beggar of a sinner who cannot help himself.

On Dec. 5 Scorsese, along with members of the cast and crew, spoke to a packed audience after a screening of "Silence" at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Days have passed, and I and my sister, Libby Weatherfield, cannot stop thinking about the film. The first thing Libby said, however, as the lights came up was, "Well, this isn't a crowd pleaser." In truth, it's not meant to be.

Even director George Lucas, who introduced the film, said, "The best way I can describe it to you is that it is interesting, because it is definitely a Martin Scorsese movie." Then he seemed to think about it a little more and said, "It's pretty extraordinary. It's one of those movies from the last century where we made all kinds of … independent, not mainstream movies. That he even got it made is a big deal. I hope you enjoy it. It's very emotional. And there's blood in it. It's Martin."

During the question-and-answer session after, Scorsese recounted his life growing up as a Roman Catholic in Manhattan and spending a year in a high school minor seminary from which he was invited to leave.

He spoke about making his 1988 film "The Last Temptation of Christ" and how people either hated it or loved it and that he spent a year going around the world either discussing or arguing about it. But there was an Episcopal priest in New York, Paul Moore, who didn't hate the film. He gave Scorsese Silence and suggested he read it. He put it aside for a year, but when in Japan in 1989 acting in the film "Dreams" for Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Scorsese read Silence and determined to make it into a film.

Actor Andrew Garfield, who has described himself as Jewish, said that making "Silence" "transcended filmmaking" for him:

How do we show a man living a question on a movie screen, a man living in a prayer for two and a half hours? I gave myself a good year to immerse myself in all things Jesuit to understand what the word God means to me on a personal level and I made the Spiritual Exercises that St. Ignatius created, that are a rite of passage for Jesuits and members of the Catholic faith … and the idea of the active imagination. The Exercises create a transformative process in the person that makes them. Then I would talk to Marty, often at length, and we would always end up with five or six minutes of silence at the end of the conversation because we knew we had gotten as close to the core of the answer to the question possible yet we were so many light years away from the answer. He would say, 'Okay kid, until next time,' and we would never get beyond this. We would always go deeper and deeper yet further and further away from the answer. Preparing for this film was a profound journey in that way and that's the beauty and the agony of the book, the beauty and the agony of the story, the beauty and the agony of living a life of faith because it means living a life of doubt. It's the same thing as showing up on the film set every day, you have no idea of what you are doing and if you think you do, you are in trouble. What we see in all Marty's films, but in this film especially is that something deep and profound and transformative is happening in the film and within the audience absorbing it.

Adam Driver, who grew up in a Christian home, said that: "An anguished faith seemed to make sense to me. I don't know if it's because I was raised in a religious household but it's like any relationship with your parents or your kids. It's not as easy as making a decision and that's it. ... It is filled with doubt and second-guessing yourself; there's insecurity and misery. Getting ready for this I kept in mind St. Peter because this image made sense to me, as someone who is very committed but who cannot help but question and doubt every step of the way."

A man in the audience asked Scorsese, " 'The Last Temptation of Christ' and 'Silence' — in your art and mind where do these two films find each other?"

He replied, giving away part of the film's ending:

'The Last Temptation of Christ' took me to a certain point in my journey. It had to do with the Incarnation and my belief that Christ being fully divine, fully human and what this could mean. ... There seemed to be further to go [on that journey] after. But it's just isn't as simple as that. It's not a simple film and it's not a simple book. … But for myself, as a believer, unbeliever, doubter, have faith, not have faith, go through life, making mistakes, I don't know. Trying to make life better, to feel your way through to live in a better way for yourself and others primarily, 'The Last Temptation of Christ' didn't take me that far. ... I knew [ Silence ] was for me, at this point in my life, the beckoning, the call. It said, 'Figure me out,' or at least try to. ... I am not Thomas Merton, I'm not Dorothy Day… so you admire them and everything else but … how can you be like them? ... How do you live it in your daily life? That is to get to the essence, I think, for me, as a Roman Catholic, true Christianity. Because when [Fr. Rodrigues] does apostatize, he gives up anything he's proud of and he's got nothing left except service, except compassion. So, he gives up his religion, he gives up his faith in order to gain his faith. Wow. How do you do that? That's amazing. Could you do that?

For the original post at the National Catholic Reporter, please click here .

Reposted by permission of National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company, 115 E Armour Blvd, Kansas City, MO 64111 NCRonline.org.\

About the Author

Sister Rose is a Daughter of St. Paul, a media literacy education specialist, and the founding director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Culver City, CA where she teaches courses on media literacy for catechists and adults. A world traveler, she gives presentations and courses on media literacy around the globe. She has a BA in Liberal Arts with concentrations in catechetics and communications, an MEd in Media Studies from the Institute of Education, University of London, UK, and a Certificate in Pastoral Communication from the University of Dayton. She is an award winning author and co-author of books on film and scripture and media literacy education. Her most recent book is “Martin Sheen: Pilgrim on the Way” (2015).

Sr. Rose is an active member of  SIGNIS, the world Catholic association for communication  and president of Catholics in Media Associates in Los Angeles. She has also served on Catholic and ecumenical juries at the Venice, Locarno, Berlin and Newport film festivals as well as the Montreux television festival. 

Rose is the film columnist for St. Anthony Messenger and  the National Catholic Reporter,  reviews films for catechists and youth for RCLBenziger, hosts her own interview and review online show “The Industry with Sister Rose on the IN Network” and writes  “Sister Rose at the Movies” blog on Patheos . Rose has created courses and facilitates them for the University of Dayton’s online Virtual Learning Community.

Sr. Rose Pacatte is a proud member of the elite  Catholic Speakers Organization, C atholicSpeakers.com .

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[Spoiler alert: To adequately discuss the message of this movie, it's necessary to know the plot and climax, which I divulge.]

My favorite movies always include what my theater professor in college called "exaltation" — a character who remains true to his principles and therefore is exalted, even if he loses or dies. This is why Braveheart  remains one of my favorite movies, despite the fact that I hate violence and rarely watch R-rated films. To this day, seeing Scottish Knight William Wallace (portrayed by Mel Gibson) endure torture and death for the freedom of his countrymen inspires me. Similarly, To End All Wars , which depicts the true story of a Christian P.O.W., crucified by his Japanese captors during World War II, deeply moves me too.

These stories remind me of the martyrs of the church, who chose to be burned at the stake or fed to wild animals rather than recant their faith. Their faithful witness caused the Church to flourish in the most inhospitable environments, and prompted second-Century theologian Tertullian to remark: "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."

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As I watch these films, I can't help but wonder if I would have the courage to follow in their footsteps. And they prompt me to pray that God would make me faithful.

The new Martin Scorsese film Silence , which had a limited debut on Dec. 23 and fully releases on Friday, turns all of this on its head. Instead of exaltation, it climaxes with a priest committing apostasy — trampling on an image of Christ, allegedly because Jesus told him to do so.

Though the film certainly has important redeeming qualities, and is largely being praised by the Christian community, it also is deeply disturbing — and potentially hazardous to one's spiritual health.

The movie, based on the historical novel by Shusaku Endo, tells the story of two 17 th-Century Portugese priests, who willingly enter Japan during a time of intense persecution of the church. Their goal is to find their mentor, Father Cristovao Ferreira (based on the historical figure  by the same name) who's gone missing, and reportedly has renounced his faith.

Once in Japan, the two priests find a remnant of faithful Christians and begin ministering to them in secret. Eventually though, they and their secret congregants are discovered by Japanese authorities and urged to do the unthinkable — apostatize (or renounce their faith) by trampling on a fumie , a crudely carved image of Christ.

One priest dies in custody. But the second, Father Rodrigues (based on the historical Giuseppe Chiara ), is taken to Nagasaki where he reunites with his old mentor, Father Ferreire. To his horror, Rodrigues discovers that Ferreira has renounced his faith. He's also become a Buddhist, taken a wife offered by Japanese authorities, and is writing a book refuting Christianity.

Disillusioned and confused, Rodrigues is then forced to watch Christians be tortured, and is told that the only way to end their suffering is to apostatize and trample on the fumie. Then a voice (apparently Christ's, though it's open to interpretation), who has been silent to this point, speaks: "Trample!" he says. "It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross."

Rodrigues tramples and then follows in the footsteps of his mentor, becoming a Buddhist, marrying, and serving as an informant for the Japanese government. However, the film hints that Rodrigues secretly maintained his faith during his apostate years, and at the end, shows him holding a cross as his dead body is ceremonially burned.

Certainly the notion that Christ would condone apostasy to end someone else's suffering is deeply problematic.

Jesus left very clear instructions about renouncing Him, saying: "(W)hoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven." (Matt. 10:33)

As believers, we know this verse, so the moral Catch-22 in Silence creates a great deal of inner emotional turmoil. We cannot accept the decision Rodrigues made, yet how can we not? This is what makes Silence so potentially treacherous.

Catholic author and editor of Aletia , Daniel McInerny, suggests  that Silence raises "the sinister possibility that Christian faith and love are internally conflicted, making a lack of integrity, at least in extreme circumstances, inevitable."

I agree with McInerny. The movie actually reminded me of a quiz my son was given by a public school teacher, which presented numerous no-win moral dilemmas and then required him to choose. The only purpose I could imagine for the quiz was to undermine a Judeo-Christian ethic, especially since it was given as part of a unit on the Salem Witch Trials.

Silence has this same disastrous potential. It raises a serious theological dilemma, but offers no solution — at least not a biblically viable one.

Silence also suggests that one can maintain his faith in complete private, and still be saved. Again, I say suggest because the film doesn't settle issues; it merely raises them. But what is the viewer supposed to conclude about Rodrigues clutching a cross at the end?

I tend to agree with the historic church position  that the sin of apostasy can be forgiven. But I am less willing to concede that someone who for decades suppressed his faith, and even colluded with persecutors of the church, would inherit the Kingdom of heaven.

As James says, faith without works is dead, and: "You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that, and shudder."

Given these troubling elements, it's somewhat surprising how enthusiastically Silence  has been received by Christians.

Author Brett McCracken wrote in his review of the film  for Christianity Today : " Silence  presents a textured, realistic Christian faith, and has the potential to build the faith of the devout and the skeptical alike, bearing fruit in the church's witness and mission in the world."

Similarly, the evangelical flagship, Wheaton College, has made the novel, Silence , a core text  for its new Christ at the Core  curriculum, and required reading for every incoming freshman.

Even Pope Francis, who invited Scorsese to the Vatican to view the film, reportedly told the filmmaker: "I hope the story of the film, knowing the book, bears much fruit."

What McCracken especially likes about the film is its ability to teach the church about "cross-cultural missions and contextualization," noting a scene revealing that the missionaries' concept of God may have been lost in translation. When Ferreira and Rodrigues meet, Ferreira alleges that the Japanese had misinterpreted "Son of God" to mean "Sun of God." As a result, they allegedly weren't worshipping God at all, but the actual sun.

These are the kinds of challenges missionaries regularly face. And certainly, reminding Westerners of this possibility has merit.

But McCracken also contends that the film is missional. Though the image of Christ is repeatedly trampled throughout the film, this tragedy is also a triumph. "It captures the distinctive power of Christianity: power in weakness."

Similarly, Wheaton College President Philip Ryken writes  about Silence , "Endo's Silence has a message for the church in every culture . . . . (Father Rodrigues') vain ambition for missionary glory is chastised by disappointment, failure, and excruciating pain. At the same time, he moves from seeing the face of Jesus in perfect beauty to seeing it disfigured by suffering." This, Ryken asserts, "is the authentic Jesus that every culture needs."

To my eyes, though, all Silence portrays is weakness. There is no triumph because triumph comes in enduring to the end. Jesus would not have triumphed had he gotten off the cross, knowing that his death and resurrection would eventually lead to the brutal execution of all but one of his apostles.

Jesus triumphed because he didn't focus on the suffering. Instead, Hebrews 12 says, "For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame. . ." Similarly, Hebrews urges us: "Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."

Though Silence  is dedicated to "Japanese Christians and their pastors," many Catholic churches in Japan actually banned the novel, Silence . The author Endo even reportedly lost a close friend, a French priest, due to the book's publication. Though I don't support book banning, I certainly can understand why the church and a priest would have that reaction.

I don't think Silence presents a helpful spiritual message, but a potentially harmful one. Yes, it has redeeming qualities. And yes, the questions it raises are worth considering — but in the right context and among believers mature enough to handle its problematic themes. But as a feature film, it's pretty depressing and potentially disillusioning. Rather than exaltation, it features capitulation. And rather than inspiring, it simply deflates and confuses.

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Why you might have heard Paul Simon’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ at Spanish Mass

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(RNS) — One song has stuck with Julio Cuellar Gonzales for practically his entire life. Among his first memories of church in the 1970s in Villa Serrano, a town in the Bolivian region of Chuquisaca, Cuellar remembers singing a specific version of the Our Father.

At the time, Cuellar thought it was written by a priest. He didn’t imagine that the beloved Our Father’s tune was actually written by Paul Simon for Simon & Garfunkel’s 1960s hit “The Sound of Silence.”

The words were different from the typical Our Father prayer. “Our Father, who art in those who truly love. May the kingdom that you promised us come soon to our hearts. The love that your son left us, may that love dwell in us,” began the song that Cuellar sang in Spanish. In the middle of the song, as a zampoña, a traditional Andean pan flute, played the melody, parishioners said the traditional Our Father together with the words from Matthew 6.

From Villa Serrano, “The Sound of Silence” Our Father followed Cuellar when he moved to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the largest city in Bolivia. “This was one of the people’s favorite songs and ours too,” he said.

This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.

Years later, after working as a musician on cruise ships in Mexico and then immigrating to Virginia, he found a Spanish Mass and heard it again. “It connected me to my childhood,” he said.

Pedro Rubalcava, the director of Oregon Catholic Press’ label group, said that “The Sound of Silence” version of the Our Father has been widespread throughout Latin America and U.S. Latino communities for the last few decades. There are variations in the words and instrumentation in different communities.

For Cuellar, even when he finally learned the tune’s origin, it still felt Andean to him: “It sounds to me like the melancholy, the melody, the sweetness of the music of the Andes.”

While there’s no proof that Simon took inspiration for “The Sound of Silence” from the Andes, he later used an Andean tune in “El Condor Pasa,” a single on Simon & Garfunkel’s Grammy-winning 1970 album, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

While Simon recorded the vocals with permission over a recording by a French Andean band, Los Incas, believing that the melody came from a folk tune, the melody actually came from Daniel Alomía Robles’ 1913 Peruvian musical theater piece called “El Cóndor Pasa.”

Valdimar Hafstein, a professor of folkloristics/ethnology at the University of Iceland, wrote in a 2018 book, “Making Intangible Heritage: El Condor Pasa and Other Stories From UNESCO,” that, given Robles’ travel through the Amazon and Andes to collect myths and music, part of a widespread tradition of “collector-composers,” it can be hard to describe the tune as either Robles’ original or an arrangement.

When Robles’ son sued Simon because his father’s composition was registered in the U.S. copyright system, Simon settled, with the son calling it “almost a friendly case.”

“The Sound of Silence” Our Father came back into Cuellar’s life when he decided to begin recording Christian music after years of focusing on secular music. “I felt like I had a debt to the Lord for the gift of the music,” Cuellar explained. When he told the Episcopal church where he was a music minister that he planned to make a record, people kept coming up to him after Mass asking for a recording of the Our Father.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Cuellar took walks in the woods around Virginia’s Lake Braddock to connect with God and escape the fear and uncertainty, he was inspired to ask his wife to film him singing the Our Father by a stream.

“We need something that will give us strength,” Cuellar told her. After his friend with experience in video editing helped polish the video, he posted it to YouTube “as a cover” because he wasn’t the author. Among many other versions of “The Sound of Silence” Our Father, Cuellar’s now has more than 23 million views.

“I’ve made music my whole life,” Cuellar said. “I’ve never reached the number of people that I’ve been able to reach with this marvelous work from the maestro Paul Simon.”

“It’s a miracle from God. It’s a message from God what has happened with” the song, Cuellar said.

But not everybody likes the version of the Our Father. Cuellar said that, while the positive comments vastly outnumber the negative, he’s heard people call it a “diabolical song,” criticizing everything from the changed words in the Our Father to the Andean instrumentation. Other people simply say that it’s not appropriate for services.

“I’m a child of God, and the devil doesn’t arrive at my house because God is here,” Cuellar said. “I’m not an expert in Christian music, but I’m an obedient person who tries to listen to the voice of God in the silence.”

Rubalcava said that Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson Pérez has taught that Catholics should not sing the version for a few reasons. First, the words to the Our Father should not be changed, especially in the liturgy. Secondly, “The Sound of Silence” forms part of the soundtrack for “The Graduate,” a 1967 movie where an extramarital affair is a major storyline.

Ireri E. Chávez-Bárcenas, an assistant professor of music at Bowdoin College and a musicologist who studies sacred song in the Hispanic world, said that the debate around the Our Father with the melody of “The Sound of Silence” draws on centuries-old controversy.

Setting a liturgical or devotional text to a known secular melody has been a “common technique used by the Catholic Church since before the Middle Ages,” Chávez-Bárcenas told Religion News Service in an email, explaining that the technique is called contrafactum.

However, Chávez-Bárcenas said the technique has always been controversial, with the best known policies against it coming during the Counter-Reformation. “In Latin America, Franciscans and Jesuits always advocated for the adaptation of liturgical texts in the local languages, songs, and musical styles,” Chávez-Bárcenas wrote.

“The Sound of Silence” is just one instance of Latino Catholics’ use of pop song melodies for devotional and liturgical music, Rubalcava said, citing an offertory song called “Saber que Vendrás” that uses Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” as its tune, various liturgical adaptations of “Jesus Christ Superstar” melodies and a Marian devotional song “Mi Virgen Bella” that uses the melody of Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno.”

“It’s illegal because you’re plagiarizing, and probably without permission,” said Rubalcava, saying copyright law is another issue with “The Sound of Silence” version of the Our Father.

Rubalcava said that these sacred versions of popular songs are passed from one church musician to another informally without official approval from broader church structures. After the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago was found guilty in 1984 of illegally photocopying the music of a religious composer, the U.S. Catholic bishops have been very serious about respecting copyright permissions, Rubalcava said.

There’s an attitude, Rubalcava said, that exists everywhere but particularly in Latin America “that anything for God should be free.” Rubalcava said, “People don’t think there’s a good reason for paying for composers, artists that are trying to make a living or trying to raise money to record some music.”

Rubalcava said that liturgical, musical and theological formation is needed so that Catholics respect that “the laborer gets their due.”

E. Michael Harrington, a professor in music copyright and intellectual property matters at Berklee Online, said that what was going on was “a problem,” but “not a really serious one.”

“Technically, they’re making a derivative work,” Harrington explained. “If you take someone else’s copyrighted material, something they authored and they own the copyright in, if you take that and change it, you’re violating their rights.”

To add new words to “The Sound of Silence” melody, musicians need to get permission from the publisher, Harrington said.

But, Harrington explained, the publisher likely will not sue “because it’s an organic thing that was unplanned and people are doing it, but they’re not profiting.”

Harrington said church leaders were taking the right steps by not endorsing the use of the melody, but he also said that they could seek a license from the publisher if they were interested in using it.

Reading the comments on his video, Cuellar sees his involvement with the Our Father as serving God. “It’s a song that touches the heart,” he said. The comments say things like, “This song gives me peace. This song gives me hope. It gives me strength.”

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Which “spirituality” is for you? A place to start

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 14, 2024

One of the confusing things about spiritual growth is how to figure out exactly what particular approaches or procedures we ought to follow to foster that growth. We may come across various particular devotions or spiritual exercises, some of which may (or may not) have a particular appeal. The Holy Spirit, and presumably our guardian angel, know how we can best focus our spiritual energies, so we should certainly ask our angels for help and spend some time in silent prayer and reflection to try to discern the promptings of the Spirit. But getting the balance right is typically an ongoing process, especially since our personal circumstances change based not only on the realities of age, family life, health, work and other responsibilities but also on our own growing (or diminishing) spiritual maturity.

If we observe what others do in the spiritual life, we find that spiritual attachments vary just like other tastes. Some prefer solitary prayer; others prefer praying in groups whenever possible. Some prefer the prayerful reading of Scripture; others would rather be in front of the tabernacle with no books at all. Some are rejuvenated by sacred song (for these, it really does seem that he who sings prays twice). Others prefer an atmosphere of total silence. As for myself, since I have the worst case imaginable of NIHS—“not invented here syndrome”—I naturally prefer solitary and silent prayer, except when praying with my wife and family.

We are all different, but the reality is that each of us ought to make a commitment to certain types of corporate prayer, and certainly it is not possible to set that aside as a Catholic. But each one needs to cultivate private prayer as well, and the exact pattern of fruitful private prayer will vary widely. It will generally be a combination of standard structured elements (set prayers and spiritual reading) and at least some effort to place oneself in the presence of God through a paradoxical combination of interior relaxation and interior focus—as may be done through active meditation, silent reflection, a simple resting in the Lord, or even moments of Divinely-initiated contemplation. Personal experience may vary, but what we can say without fear of contradiction is that the following should be assumed to be true by Catholics:

• Sacramental participation is always essential insofar as it is available. Put negatively, a disdain for the sacraments of the Church is a rejection of Christ Himself, and so a roadblock to spiritual development.
• Little spiritual growth can be expected unless a certain amount of time is set aside for private prayer each day, even if, at the beginning, only as little as five or ten minutes. As spiritual maturity increases, the time set aside generally increases, and we also gradually learn to pray in all circumstances.
• For the mentally unimpaired, some spiritual study and deliberate focus on the techniques of prayer are typically necessary to our efforts to grow into closer union with God. Here, pastoral recommendations and/or acknowledged Catholic spiritual classics provide the starting points.

Particular approaches

My own spiritual development has been assisted significantly by the concepts of “practicing the presence of God” and “the sacrament of the present moment”—two ways of describing the deliberate effort to live always with an awareness of God, His closeness to us, and His will for us here and now. More negatively, I have (eventually) learned that periods of preoccupation with the great deeds I am going to do for God in the distant future ought to be regarded as distractions.

Indeed, in reflecting on such flights of “spiritual” imagination, I am reminded of what St. Ignatius of Loyola discovered during his efforts to study philosophy and theology. It seems that whenever he sat down to this work, his imagination was fired with beautiful and lofty spiritual visions, so that he could make little or no progress on what he was supposed to be learning at that moment. But Ignatius eventually realized that even these beautiful thoughts were mere distractions, to be banished in favor of his present spiritual responsibilities. The Devil often appears as an angel of light.

This particular observation might be useful to somebody else, and the point here is that there have been a great many observations about spiritual growth and development by those we call “spiritual masters” throughout the history of the Church, each one of whom developed a significant approach to spiritual growth that can be of great use to others. In some ways, they can all be melded together, and they can all be spiritually useful to most of us; but in other ways, spiritual development is not a “one size fits all” kind of thing. Therefore, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get started not by reading, say, all of St. Augustine and all of St. John of the Cross, but instead by gaining an overview of the unique contribution of St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, and a manageable selection of other classic Catholic spiritual guides?

Perhaps we could then more easily discern which ones, at any given moment or period in our lives, we might most profitably use for spiritual reading. Surely this might save us from reading the right author at the wrong time, while missing the author who is most likely, in that moment, to do us the most good.

One solution

This is the beauty of a new book from Ignatius Press by Archbishop Emeritus Alfred C. Hughes, Spiritual Masters: Living and Praying in the Catholic Tradition . Archbishop Hughes covers thirteen spiritual masters from the third through the eighteenth centuries, each of whom has provided a key to union with God in the Church Christ founded. These are all keys that can be used by everyone, but one of them is very likely to prove to be the master key for each particular person’s spiritual development.

Of the thirteen spiritual masters covered, eight are canonized saints. The table of contents provides an indicative outline:

• Taking Christian Life Seriously: Anthony and Desert Solitude
• Who are We? Walter Hilton and the Image of God
• Something’s Wrong: Augustine Discovers Sin
• Maturing in Love: Aelred on Friendship
• A Holy Rhythm of Life: Benedict and His Rule
• Spiritual Warfare: Thomas à Kempis and The Imitation of Christ
• The Goal of Prayer: Guigo’s Ladder
• Prayer and Real Life: Teresa of Ávila and The Way of Perfection
• The Sacramental Mystery: Catherine of Siena’s Burning Desire
• A Life of Virtue: The Devout Life of Francis de Sales
• Discerning Our Place in the World: Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises
• Suffering: John of the Cross and The Dark Night
• The Goal of Life: Jean-Pierre de Caussade and the Gift of Abandonment

Archbishop Hughes has provided a rich and accessible introduction to the most important insights of these giants in the Church’s history of sound spiritual writing, holy men and women whom the Church has consistently recommended as sound mentors. Thus Spiritual Masters offers thirteen different emphases in the spiritual life which will serve the reader well both as a survey of key Catholic insights for growth in grace and as a guide to those authors who may be most beneficial for personal spiritual reading. There can be no question that such reading is needed as the life of Christ continues to grow and flower in each unique soul.

Archbishop Emeritus Alfred C. Hughes, Spiritual Masters: Living and Praying in the Catholic Tradition . Ignatius Press, 2024. 182 pp. Paper $17.95; eBook $11.67.

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

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Catholic Review

Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Why listening is key for the future of pro-life movement

Abortion for any reason at any time has become radically normalized. One need look no further than abortion groups’ distribution of abortifacients at pop star Olivia Rodrigo’s concerts to see how much it pervades our culture. As a father of three daughters within the average ages of Rodrigo’s fans, my heart breaks for all women who have been sold the false promises of abortion. Thankfully, the distribution of these drugs has since stopped after widespread media backlash. Nevertheless, scenarios like this show that the lies of abortion are constantly bombarding vulnerable women and girls.

Abortion tells women that if they want to reach their dreams; are too young, weak or poor; or do not want children at this time, it’s Ok to end their child’s life. It is sold as a failsafe, burdenless solution to an unexpected pregnancy.

The truth is abortion hurts women. I have studied ethics for the majority of my adult life and, for me, it has always been clear that a human life begins at conception and abortion unjustly kills a human being. As I have become a father and helped raise my daughters, I have seen the way an abortion-shaped culture can impact society.

This realization led me, a year ago, to start listening to a podcast that lets women tell their abortion stories. While I do not agree with the pro-choice goals of the show, I respect the women who tell their stories with such detail and honesty. It was the first time that I heard women’s expressions of grief and loss, descriptions of the uncomfortable silence inside abortion clinics and honesty about difficulties along the road to recovery after abortion.

Their stories highlight the humanity of the women who have had abortions and offer valuable lessons for those of us who hope to reach women with real alternatives to abortion. Here is what stood out to me.

First, becoming pregnant unexpectedly and having an abortion changes a woman for the rest of her life. Becoming pregnant is often a pivot from girlhood toward womanhood. For younger women, having an abortion is one of the first hard and adult decisions she ever had to make. She seeks people to talk to and often learns who her real friends are, and aren’t. The abortion experience is a surprising blast of reality for many of the women, a feeling that often stays with them for the rest of their lives.

Second, the experience inside the abortion clinic is often painful, sad and lonely, and one they never want to repeat. Many women speak about a strange silence in the waiting room, where the women all know why they are there and do not make eye contact or speak to each other. Sometimes the clinic staff even instruct them not to have conversations, which becomes especially difficult when one woman becomes upset and another wants to comfort her. They are disappointed when their partner, if he accompanies her, has to stay in the waiting room when she goes back for the abortion.

Third, most women who get abortions recognize that they have ended the life of a child, and many feel that they have lost something of themselves too. They know an embryo is not a blob of cells but a human being. They feel embarrassed that they let themselves get pregnant. They feel the pressure that our society places on women to abort when the circumstances are not right, and then they feel the guilt of having aborted. It can take years to process the grief. The women write about the experience, mark anniversaries of due dates as birthdays, bury the remains, and visit burial places. Other women repress their grief, only to have it return years later.

Finally, having an abortion often makes a woman reexamine her assumptions about fundamental human questions regarding suffering, love, fertility, loss, death, grief, shame and failure. Many of the women say they regret the circumstances that led them to become pregnant and confront that choice. Some say the experience “showed me I needed to grow up and get my act together.” Women arrive at a more mature vision of permanent loving relationships, recognize the problems of the men they had been involved with, change relationship habits and end up married with children. Sometimes there’s a need to take stock of her own talents and aspirations and embark on a long-term project in life, work, or both.

Pro-lifers and pro-choicers both can miss the full experience of unexpected pregnancy and abortion and fail to see that post-abortive women are so much more than their singular decision to have an abortion.

The stories I’ve heard make it ever more clear in my mind that abortion offers a woman pain, trauma and loneliness when what she really needs is support and love. Listening to women allows us to offer them hope, love and realistic alternatives to abortion through the plentiful pregnancy resource centers and maternity homes across the United States. These centers help women and children by partnering with community resources to address needs for safe and affordable housing, quality and affordable daycare, recovery programs and other material and emotional support.

Women should never feel alone, and that became personal to me when my wife and I had my three daughters. Human dignity ought to be honored and loved at all stages of life, whether someone is unborn, unexpectedly pregnant, port-abortive or living with grief and trauma. Women deserve better than abortion.

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