Rome

Rome is the distant center of Catholic authority in Shusaku Endo's Silence, the place from which the Church dispatches missionaries and receives reports of persecution, and the seat of the institutional judgment that condemns apostasy. It functions as a symbol of a Western Christianity that remains remote from the Japanese 'swamp,' unable to comprehend the agonizing choices faced by missionaries and converts on the ground.

The Seat of Authority and the Source of Mission

News of Christovao Ferreira's apostasy first reached the Church in Rome, where it was met with disbelief. The Church at Rome was not ignorant of the straitened circumstances of the Japanese mission, having received letters from the missionaries that left no room for doubt about the severity of the persecution. Yet it was in Rome that four priests gathered around Father Rubino in 1635, planning to enter Japan to carry on an underground apostolate and to atone for Ferreira's apostasy, which had so wounded the honor of the Church. The Church authorities were reluctant to send more priests into such peril, but the idea that Ferreira's failure was a humiliating defeat for the faith itself and for the whole of Europe prevailed, and the mission was permitted. The three Portuguese priests—Sebastian Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe, and Juan de Santa Marta—who had been Ferreira's students, also sought permission to go to Japan to investigate the truth about their teacher, and their Superiors in Portugal, after initial reluctance, agreed to the dangerous mission.

The Uncomprehending Center

Rome's perspective is repeatedly contrasted with the lived reality of the Japanese mission. The translator's preface notes that the novel's interest in Japan was less historical than contemporary, and that the two foreign apostates were taken as symbols of a Christianity that has failed in Japan because it is stubbornly Western. The novel itself explores the idea that Japan is a 'swamp' that cannot absorb the type of Christianity propagated from the West. The interpreter who interrogates Rodrigues, a former seminarian, expresses resentment that the fathers, like Father Cabral, had nothing but contempt for everything Japanese, despising their houses, language, food, and customs, and not allowing even seminary graduates to become priests. This resentment is directed not just at Cabral but at the fact that he once received baptism, a baptism that came from the distant authority of Rome.

The Swamp and the Sapling

Ferreira, in his confrontation with Rodrigues, articulates the central thesis that the Christianity brought from Rome cannot take root in Japan. He describes Japan as a swamp where the sapling of Christianity rots at the roots. He argues that the Japanese have never had the concept of a God completely divorced from man, and that they twisted the Christian God into something of their own. Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, echoes this, telling Rodrigues that he was not defeated by him but by the swamp of Japan. Inoue further explains that the God whom the peasants of Goto and Ikitsuki secretly serve has gradually changed so as to be no longer like the Christian God at all. The novel's appendix, a diary from the Christian Residence in Edo, records that Okada San'emon (the apostate Rodrigues) was engaged in writing a disavowal of his religion at the command of the authorities, a final act of repudiation of the faith that had come from Rome.