By Grazie Pozo Christie
Martin Scorsese, never afraid of a challenge, takes up the human struggle of faith and fidelity in his upcoming movie about missionaries and martyrs: “Silence.” He himself describes it as an attempt to tell the story of the Christian faith and “the difficulty, the crisis, of believing.” I would describe it as a bracing plunge into the minds and souls of those whose faith is an intimate, personal love – the kind that demands and deserves heroic integrity.
The director presents a vivid story of Christian evangelization and martyrdom. And he does this to a rapidly secularizing culture that finds it increasingly difficult to understand the demands and rewards of faith. If religions, as secularists believe, are anodyne myths, isn’t it silliness to make yourself uncomfortable fulfilling religious obligations, and foolishness to suffer professionally or socially because you won’t act in a way that contradicts the truths you live by? Isn’t it the height of insanity to die rather than renounce your allegiance?
