Ordained by a Cock’s Crew: The Making of a Priest in Shusaku Endo’s Silence

Priesthood: a calling to dedicate one’s life to love and speak as Christ did, today it becomes a word tainted by the trauma of sexual abuse and institutional silencing; a vocation that demystifies God’s presence in the world, yet today often clouding God’s presence by its pervasive clerical bureaucracy and theologies of exclusion. In a world where the word “priesthood” call to our mind more disappointment than hope, the theological and pastoral understanding of the priesthood must be transformed from within the heart of the priest himself to pave the way for any structural change. This Lent, we turn to two apostatized Portuguese priests and one treacherous Japanese Christian in the 1600s Japan in Shusaku Endo’s Silence for an image of this renewed priesthood — both of the ordained priesthood and the universal priesthood to which we all are called.

The spiritual and physical journey of Sebastian Rodrigues is an arduous lenten journey: one that moves away from self-importance or from proclaiming Christ for the sake of self, and painfully toward the perfect imitation of Christ rooted in the renunciation of one’s own self. While this journey ends in his formal apostasy and trampling upon the image of Christ, it marks the beginning of his living into a true priestly vocation. In other words, to live out the priestly vocation of in persona Christi, it must first be forgotten and replaced with a desire to live in the imitation of Christ.

At the start of the book, young Father Rodrigues arrived in Japan full of zeal and ambition to proclaim Christianity to the Japanese people, whom he deemed as “miserable and corrupt” because of their peasant-like living conditions. Determined, just as Christ did, to “seek out the lonely and abandoned flock”, Rodrigues constantly compared himself and his own sufferings — his physical thirst, his loneliness, and his betrayal by Kichijiro — to the sufferings of Jesus Christ on the night of his death. Likewise, he secretly craved for a martyrdom like Christ’s death on the cross, where he would suffer and die in the name of Christianity here in Japan.

As a deeply spiritual but youthfully arrogant priest, Rodrigues isn’t entirely at fault for his zeal for a life and martyrdom akin to Christ’s. After all, early Christian writers have long since compared the suffering of their martyred companions to the death of Christ on the cross. The priest himself, similarly, is often likewise considered to be liturgically, in persona christi, or in the person of Christ as he ministers sacraments such as the Eucharist and Reconciliation. Not only Rodrigues the character, but prominent Catholic figures such as Bishop Robert Barron likewise applauded the perfect martyrdoms in the book — as exemplified by the three Japanese Christian men tied up to a cross and drowned, perfectly mirroring traditional crucifixion imageries of three crosses on a hill — as the ultimate act of the imitation of Christ.

As the book curiously switches from first person account to third person omniscient, Rodrigues likewise slowly shifts away from his egocentrism and self-identification with images of Christ. During the final night before his apostasy, Rodrigues began the night by thinking that the snoring guards he heard from his jail cell paralleled the indifference of the snoring disciples on the night before Christ’s own death. The moment of revelation came when Rodrigues discovers that the sound he hears was not the sound of snoring guards, but the groaning of Japanese Christians already hanging in the pit of torture because of him. It was he, not anyone else, who was the snoring disciple, indifferent to and unaware of the sufferings of his companions.

Here, Rodrigues ceased to picture himself as Christ, or the only hope for the Christian believers of Japan, but began to see himself as Judas, or those who have betrayed Christ. The cowardly and ever-betraying Kichijiro, who Rodrigues despises to the point of describing him as a wretched mouse, the priest realizes, was no different from and no worse than Rodrigues himself. Rather than the earthly representation of the God who saves the “miserable and corrupt”, he himself was the face of the miserable and corrupt.

The end of Rodrigues’ self-association with Jesus Christ is the beginning of him living a life of true imitation of Christ, or in Eastern Orthodox language, theosis. True theosis, as Rodrigues comes to realize, is not the fascination of one’s own in persona christi role, but living a life of self-renunciation and self-erasing sacrifice for the sake of others. For Rodrigues, stepping on the fumie of the ugly face of Christ became the ultimate and most painful act of sacrifice. In doing so, Rodrigues dies to his status, his ego, his pride, his religious authority, and every “label” that made Rodrigues who he was.

Yet only by stepping on the fumie to save the lives of others — even if only one, or only a few — does Rodrigues begin to live in imitation of the love of the Christ who, too, would die on the cross even just to save a single soul. While his formal priestly duties died with his apostasy, his true acceptance of his call to priesthood and to the imitation of Christ here begins.

When Rodrigues finally stepped on the face of Christ that begged him to trample upon it, the cock, too, crew, inevitably conjuring up the image of Peter’s betrayal of Jesus on Good Friday in the minds of Christian readers. Yet this painful moment in the book often understood as a betrayal, on the flip side, is also a moment during which Rodrigues, for the first time, becomes identified with Peter, the very first priest. In other words, Rodrigues for the first time, truly becomes a priest through an experience of “ordination by fire”- his faith, his doubt, and his weaknesses becomes united with that of Peter, the rock upon whom Christ has built his church. It is upon this true priesthood of Rodrigues — a priesthood of self-sacrifice and renunciation — that Christ would, and indeed had, build his Church in Japan: the Japanese Christians who survived this height of persecution persevered in their faith and remained “Hidden Christians” for two centuries until the ban on Christianity was lifted.

The book hence ends with the image of the ultimate sacramental act of in persona Christi: the sacrament of reconciliation, which Rodrigues hesitantly ministers to Kichijiro, yet again, absolving him of his sins in the name of Christ. Despite and perhaps because of his apostasy in the imitation of Christ, Rodrigues remains and becomes a priest, now ordained with the indelible grace to act in persona Christi to demystify God’s love for those who seek it. In other words, it was through the active abandonment of his obsession with being in persona Christi, that Rodrigues — and all priests alike — becomes a true priest and a true imitation of Christ’s love on earth.

For the priests in Silence, this meant trampling on the ugly face of Christ and committing a life to a sacrificial love that is beyond the “perfect martyrdom.” For the priesthood today, the sacrifice may be equally radical: the facade of clerical perfection need to be shattered for the priesthood to return to its true vocation.