But in fact they are laying down their lives for you. You came to this country to lay down your life for them. It will not be Rodrigues or fellow priests who will suffer the most from the authorities, but the Japanese peasants who gave him hiding, increasingly the misery of an already impoverished people, while he escapes unharmed. But with high rewards on offer for information on Christians, it is only a matter of time before Rodrigues’ presence is betrayed to the authorities. Surviving the perilous sea journey, refusing to be dissuaded by those who argue against his mission, he succeeds in smuggling himself into Japan and hiding near a village of secretly-Christian Japanese. Rodrigues cannot believe the rumours of the man he holds in such high esteem and is determined to discover the truth. That he now resides in Nagasaki with a Japanese wife in service to the authorities who continue in their attempts to exterminate the foreign religion. News has reached Portugal that Father Ferreira, another Jesuit missionary in Japan and Rodrigues’ former mentor, has renounced his faith and apostatised under torture. ![]() It is to the aid of Japan’s persecuted Christian minority that Rodrigues wishes to make this dangerous journey, but there is a second motivation he has in mind. ![]() But rumours persist that many Japanese continue to be secret Christians at heart, but without priests, bibles, relics or a church hierarchy, they are an abandoned flock. Ever since, Christianity in Japan has been outlawed, Christians have been tortured and executed and ships from known Catholic states such as Spain and Portugal have been banned. While Francis Xavier helped establish Christianity in Japan, leading to the building of churches and seminaries at one point, Japan has since brutally suppressed its Christian minority, particularly following the Christian uprising known as the Shimabara Rebellion. Or rather, if I begin to reflect that it is not a dream I feel like shouting out that it is a miracle. Certainly my being in this utterly remote and unknown Oriental town is like a dream. A throbbing sensation fills my being, and behind my eyelids arises the memory of that long and terrible sea journey so that my breast is filled with pain. And I keep turning over in my mind the thought that I am at the end of the earth, in a place which you do not know and which your whole lives through you will never visit. A member of the Jesuits, Rodrigues is to follow in the footsteps of the order’s co-founder, St Francis Xavier, and journey to Japan via Goa and Macao.īeneath the light of the candle I am sitting with my hands on my knees, staring in front of me. In 1640, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, an idealist Portuguese Catholic priest, is about to embark on a perilous journey to the end of the Earth and the dangerous frontier of Christian missionary work. It is a fable of idealism and its victims, of suffering and cruelty, of betrayal, disillusionment and ultimate sacrifice. A story of religious persecution in seventeenth-century feudal Japan told by an idealist Jesuit priest. Silence is considered to be one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |