Shusaku Endo’s Silence
Martin Scorcese’s 2016 film, based on Shusaku Endo’s celebrated novel Silence, raises a wide range of faith-related questions. The story follows Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues, a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest from Portugal who sneaks into Japan in a time when Christians were brutally persecuted there.
Bring this complex and provocative story into your parish or school with the help of the original novel, Patrick T. Reardon's personal and group reading guide Faith Stripped to It's Essence and Makoto Fujimura's unique artistic and faith perspective Silence and Beauty—all bulk priced.
Martin Scorcese has been working on his film adaptation since 1990. One of the actors in the film calls it “deep, difficult, timeless, huge in scope and emotion.” Scorcese himself has long discussed the novel’s interplay between faith, loneliness, doubt, and oppression. “Questioning may lead to great loneliness,” he says, “but if it co-exists with faith—true faith, abiding faith—it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage—from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion—that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully, and beautifully in Silence.”
