Closer to Scorsese's "Silence"

Jesuit priest Tim Byron reports that we're getting closer to Martin Scorsese's film adaptation of Shusaku Endo's Silence. The acclaimed director's love of the book comes through his forward to a recent edition:

How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? ... [Shusaku Endo] understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful - the questioning faithful - to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture...That's a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, 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.

I liked Endo's Silence, but I liked The Samurai better, and wrote about it here. I've been waiting for news on Silence since 2006, when I posted this:

What will the acclaimed director focus on from Endo's novel? What concerns me is what will be done with the priest's spiritual struggles and with the challenges from his tormentors. The priest in the novel often asks himself about the silence of God in the face of such intense suffering on the part of faithful Christians. And the tormentors often remind the priest that the Japanese have their own religion (Buddhism) and the Christian faith he is trying to transplant in that foreign soil will never survive. The Japanese officials, in fact, consider Christianity just one more Western characteristic they are trying to expel from their islands.

Could it be that it's this theme that has captured the attention of the director and screenwriter: the conviction that Christianity is part of "Western culture" that shouldn't be imposed on other cultures? Never mind that it's this conviction that led 17th century Japanese magistrates to devise the most inhumane of tortures for their own Japanese citizens who embraced Christianity.

Will the magistrates become "the voice of reason" in this film adaptation of the novel? Will the film convey the futility of missionaries like this priest who bring Christianity to other cultures only to bring trouble to the people who embrace it? It would certainly fit the spirit of the age: To many, Christianity is looked upon as a "Western religion"--even an "American religion"--that shouldn't be transplanted to other cultures. In reality, Christianity is a universal faith that transcends passports, flags, and national customs. Far from being "Western" or "American," culturally-speaking, Christianity actually sprang from a Jewish messianic movement in first-century Jersusalem under Roman occupation. It spread from there south, east, west, and--for our interests in America--it also spread north into what is now Europe and the British isles to take root in Anglo-Saxon soil and from there made its way to America. In other words, cultures now considered "Western" and specifically "American" were recipients of missionary outreach long, long before they became supporters of missionary outreach.

More here.