"Silence" (2016) movie review

Two women for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration suggested that I should watch Silence (2016). So I did.

Vorgriffe

I put some "preapprehensions" on the record before I took the time to watch "Silence" this afternoon.

From what I have read or heard or fantasize about the movie, I expected that it would:

- be pretentious;

- distort the real history of the Japanese martyrs;

- emphasize classic Japanese Shinto-Buddhist spirituality;

- downplay the necessity of preaching Jesus as the Savior of all of God's children;

- justify apostasy as the highest form of love for God and neighbor--the greatest evil is death of the innocent, and therefore the greatest good is to save the innocent by repudiating the gospel;

- silently recommend that Christians should be silent in today's culture wars because preaching Jesus does more harm than good;

- cultivate indifferentism: if God is love, and loves all of His children whole-heartedly at all times and in all places, then why should missionaries go out to all the world?

"Can anything good come out of Scorsese?"

I'm not saying that I'm being fair to the movie. Obviously, a good man would WATCH it with an open mind before judging it. I am not a good man, but I would love to have a good conversation with these two women of faith, and so I am going to do my level best to set these prejudices aside and see what I can see in the movie itself. But it would be dishonest to pretend that I don't have prejudices. One of the morals of the story about tacit knowing is that we do make up our minds very rapidly, "in the blink of an eye," on very limited information.

I have never watched Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.

I would never have gone to see "The Passion of the Christ" if a good friend had not forced me to. We nearly had a fistfight talking about the movie afterward.

I avoided the Dan Brown books until students' questions forced me to slog through them.

I am avoiding most of the evangelical movies (e.g., God is not Dead, I & II).

OK. Done with the first part of it. I will try to pick up the movie some time this afternoon because you are my friends and because I love talking about things with you. Please forgive me my vorgriffe. That's life with me! :-O

Postgriffe (Hindsights)

I worked my way through the movie through the course of an afternoon. I took several breaks, especially a nap after the first 41 minutes. With 15 minutes to go, I got a peanut butter sandwich and some decaf. That helped.

"Thousands have died because of us."

No. Thousands died because of the animosity of those who murdered them.

Martyrdom is as old as Christianity itself. The pattern began with Jesus and has continued in an unbroken chain for 20 centuries. Jesus predicted His own suffering and death; he also predicted that His followers would suffer and die. Any 17th-century Jesuits who did not understand that following Jesus on the way of the Cross means real suffering and real death would be morons.

So low Church--no vestments at Mass, no candles.

This is how Protestants and contemporary modernists celebrate communion services, not Catholic priests of the 17th century.

Why does Rodrigues bless himself rather than the penitent?

This makes no sense to me whatsoever. The penitent says, "Bless me, father, for I have sinned." The appropriate gesture is to make the sign of the cross over the penitent, not to make it over oneself.

Sacramental theology and the use of sacramentals

Rosaries, crosses, scapulars, candles, holy water, icons, rings, incense, bells, vestments, and the like are material things that help us to remember spiritual realities.

In his interior monologue, Rodrigues says something like, "I feared that they valued these things more than the realities of the faith." If so, he ought to have seized the moment BEFORE blessing and distributing the sacramentals to teach the lesson that God looks at our hearts, not at the things in our hands or on our walls or on our bookshelves. He is as guilty of superstition as they are, breaking his rosary up into parts and treating the beads as holy objects with magical powers. The people could and did make rosaries and crosses themselves. A handmade crucifix is in the final scene of the movie--there was nothing more holy about the wooden crosses or rosary beads that he distributed.

I wanted to shout at Rodrigues what I heard a mother say to a cranky child: "Use your words!" The film makers believe that remaining silent about the nature of faith is the most loving thing to do. They don't think that the questions they raise have meaningful answers. They and Rodrigues think that the best thing to do in the face of ignorant superstition is to distribute more religious trinkets that will be used in a stupid and supertitious fashion. <dope slap!>

A child's faith will not get us through adult difficulties.

Rodrigues is a simpleton. I foresaw as I watched the first hours of the movie that he would be crushed when he discovered that his hero had committed apostasy and was living happily ever after. He thought that having faith means that God will answer all of our prayers and protect us from suffering and death. That is what children naturally and understandably and innocently believe. But Jesus did not say that faith would keep us from suffering in this lifetime--far from it! He said that if we had faith, we would suffer and die as He did.

Why does God allow innocent suffering?

Rodrigues asks, "Why do these people have to suffer? Why has God chosen them to suffer so much?" The Tradition of the Old and New Testaments asks this question. The Book of Job and the whole of the scriptures of the New Covenant grapple with this fact: God allows innocent people to suffer. The martyrdom of Christians in Japan in the 17th century was a horror, but it was not a novelty. Innocent Jews and Christians and human beings of all kinds have suffered horrors before and since then.

For me, the short answer to the question is, [[Bad Things Happen to Good People|"Because it is more fun this way."] A world in which there could be no innocent suffering is a world in which there could be no love. If there were no love, there would be no joy. Accepting innocent suffering as the price of freedom is part of the faith. Above all, God the Son, truly God and truly human, accepted His innocent suffering gladly and willingly,

"for the sake of the joy that was set before Him" (Heb 12:2).

Movies are good at portraying torture, among other things that photograph well. They are not good at portraying the joys of eternal life because God has not allowed cameras into His courtroom. We can see the suffering; we have heard of the joys of Heaven.

When Rodrigues asked this question, as if it were unanswerable, it was obvious that he would be crushed and lose his faith in God but gain faith in men. An alternative twist would have been for him to kill the apostate, but that thought does not seem to have crossed the minds of the authors.

The power and weakness of Baptism

The question raised by the parents is a good one. Instead of looking like a deer caught in the headlights, Rodrigues should have said, "You know well that we adults sin. That is why we have Confession and the Eucharist. Baptism saves us and sanctifies us, but when your child is old enough to make her own choices, she will have to decide for herself--just as you do!--whether she will live for love. At the moment, she is innocent and full of grace, like Mary. If she dies before she can make her own choice, she will enter Heaven. If she lives long enough to have the power to love, as we do, then she will be judged on the quality of her choices, as we all are.

This kind of reflection on the nature of baptism should have taken place during the years of formation that all Jesuits received. As with the question about innocent suffering, it is strange that the movie makes it seem that the two Jesuits have never thought about the issue of "once saved, always saved" until they had landed in Japan and started baptizing babies.

Unprocessed material

"How can I explain His silence to these people? He heard their prayers, did He hear their screams?" This man has no faith whatsoever!

"I'm just a foreigner who brought disaster. That's what they think of me now."

If there were a God, no one would suffer.

If there were a God, every time we prayed, we would hear Him.

If there were a God, we could summon Him whenever we wish.

"All the time Fr. Cabral was here, he taught, but he would not learn. He despised our language, our food, and our customs."

I just hate the way they portray this poor man, as if after 1600 years of history, he might have thought that faith could protect us from suffering and death. So stupid! Make a caricature of the faith, a paper tiger, attribute it to the Jesuits, and make us look ridiculous for having childish faith. It's so manipulative!

"Because of your dream of a Christian Japan."

"You were silent even to Him." That's an incredible distortion of the gospels! Luke: angels come and console Jesus. John: no agony. Words from the Cross. Prophecies of the Passion. The Last Supper--first Mass.

Yes, He suffered. Suffering does not have the last word. The last word is JOY.

"If Jesus were here, this is what He would do."

Mother Teresa: the silence of GOD!

"The Japanese are incapable of thinking of anything beyond nature. They have no concept of 'God.' The word Francis Xavier chose just means the sun. It rises every day."

"What is true in Europe is not true in Japan. Nobody has any business interfering with another person's culture."

"All religions are the same. There is no difference between Buddhism and Christianity."