Mission Trade: A Primary Goal Term Paper

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Silence, Endo uses the background of persecution to contemplate these knotty questions. ("Silence")

Endo seeks to show within Silence, then, how the missionaries themselves misunderstood which aspects of Christianity to emphasize to Japanese would-be converts, just as he himself had misunderstood the universal appeal that Christianity could potentially have in areas outside the western world, including Japan, until he had visited Palestine. As a missionary religion, as Endo also implies, Christianity must rely on persuasive power in order to truly capture the hearts and minds of people anywhere that it seeks to convert. Japanese feudalism and European trade, on the other hand, rely only on force, coercion, and violence - no match for Christian missionaries in an area like Japan, especially if those missionaries' Christianity is not accepted in Japan in the first place. Religious zeal, then, in order to have any real hope of vanquishing competing economic forces, must be heartfelt by considerable numbers of people, rather than rejected by them, in order for religion to have even the faintest hope of defeating the forces of trade, feudalism, or both combined. On the other hand, in the Mission, since the Jesuits succeeded in capturing the hearts and minds of the indigenous Colombians, the indigenous peoples themselves became willing to fight the tradesmen in order to protect their own new way of life, and their church. In both stories, Christianity was defeated, but in the Mission, at least, as the end of the film showed, some vestiges of Christianity at least remained among the surviving Colombian Indians.

Both Endo's novel Silence and Rolfe Joffe's the Mission, then, suggest that European trade and European religion were major objectives, though seriously conflicting ones, of the European groups who came into contact with the peoples of the Americas from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Arguably, all such forces, including those of the Catholic Church, were disruptive and invasive, but at least within the Mission, the Catholic church was shown as bringing about some tangible benefits, in terms of shelter and safety, to the indigenous peoples they sought to convert.

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In Silence, on the other hand, the Portugese Missionaries, and those who had come before them, seriously misunderstood, as Endo implies within this novel, the inherent reasons for the non-acceptance of Christianity by the Japanese.

If Silence implies the blind spots of the Catholic church during these centuries, and by implication the leading reasons why, at least in Japan, the forces of the Church were no match for competing economic forces like European trade and Japanese feudalism, the Mission shows the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church itself, which refused, for example, to stand behind the Jesuits and the Indians, as they sought to defend the mission they had built for the Indians against the Portugese. Joffe shows within this film how, ironically, even the Church itself chose to essentially form an alliance with Portugese tradesman, rather than help the Jesuits, who were (and still are) seen as rebels within the Church. But the Jesuits had discovered how to reach out to the Colombian Indians in ways the Church itself (like in Silence) had not. This, as both Endo and Joffee imply in their respective works, although differently, is perhaps a major reason why, many times, during these centuries, the forces of European trade were more successful within non-Christianized areas of the world than the forces of the Church, although (as the Mission illustrates) it did not necessarily have to be that way. European trade and religious conversion were key objectives of different groups of Europeans who came into contact with the peoples of the Americas and Asia from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. For reasons not entirely outside the control of the Catholic Church, as both of these works imply, the European tradesmen, and other, similar, economic forces, won out over religious conversion more often than not.

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