By Joenner Paulo L. Enriquez and Ma. Alena O. Castillo in Manila

Thomasian Jesuit priests Fr Albert Alejo and Fr Flaviano Villanueva have posted P10,000 (NZ$310) bail each after a judge issued a warrant of arrest in connection with their sedition case.

“Nag-piyansa na kami Fr Flavie at sumama [na] rin si Fr Robert [Reyes] at mga abogado namin. Napirmahan [na] kahapon ang warrant of arrest,” Fr Alejo told The Varsitarian.

The pre-trial conference and arraignment of the case were set fo March 17, according to a court order that granted their temporary liberty.

READ MORE: Philippines court orders arrest of Trillanes, 10 others on sedition charge

The case stems from allegations by ex-convict Peter Advincula who tagged the priests, four bishops and political figures in an alleged “destablisation plot” against the Duterte administration involving the Ang Totoong Narcolist (The True Narcolist) video series, which linked the president and his family to the illegal drug trade.

The Department of Justice, however, dismissed the charges against Novaliches Bishop Emeritus Teodoro Bacani Jr., Cubao Bishop Honesto Ongtioco, Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, and 22 other individuals on February 10.

The Quezon City Metropolitan Trial Court Branch 138 on Thursday also ordered the arrest of former senator Antonio Trillanes IV, Peter Advincula, or “Bikoy,” and nine other individuals accused of plotting to destabilise the government.

Senior Assistant State Prosecutor Olivia Torrevillas on Thursday said the 11 individuals were charged with “conspiracy” to commit sedition, not “inciting” to sedition, since there was no clear act to cause an uprising.

Fr Alejo obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. He was also a Varsitarian Filipino writer.

Joenner Paulo L. Enriquez and Ma. Alena O. Castillo are reporters for the student newspaper The Varsitarian. Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Gwyn McClelland in Melbourne

Today, Martin Scorsese’s Silence will have its premiere at the Vatican, where it will be screened to hundreds of Roman Catholic priests.

The famed director’s first foray into East Asia links to familiar themes of Catholic guilt and redemption, as he portrays the brutal 17th century persecution of Jesuit missionaries and their converts in Japan.

Scorsese’s film, which will open here in January, is an adaptation of Japanese author Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence. It tells the story of two Portuguese Jesuit priests (Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield) who travel to Japan at a time when Christianity was banned to find their mentor (Liam Neeson) and support the local converts.

The pair are imprisoned and tortured.

The characters of the priests Cristóvão Ferreira and Sebastian Rodrigues were based on Portuguese and Italian Jesuits found in the historical record.

Endo’s novel (沈黙）describes the hostile environment that leads to the missionary priests’ relinquishment of faith. They were forced to place their feet on fumi-e （踏み絵) – religious images – to demonstrate that they had given up all faith.

Rodrigues (played by Garfield in the film), believes he hears Jesus’ voice telling him to apostatise by stepping on the fumi-e.

‘Hidden Christianity’
The remaining Christians went underground. The persecution continued until the ban against Christians was removed in 1873. But the indigenous Japanese who returned to Catholicism in the 1870s after 250 years of “hidden Christianity” remembered their long period of “betrayal”.

Most descendants of the native Christians lived in Nagasaki during World War II. On the 9 August 1945, when the United States dropped the A-bomb on Urakami, a northern suburb of Nagasaki, 8500 of the 12000-strong Catholic Christian community were among the dead.

The bomb was meant to target Nagasaki city, but because the Americans were low on fuel and clouds opened above the northern suburbs, the eventual Ground Zero happened in Urakami.

Its cathedral – the biggest Catholic church in Asia at the time – was only 500m from Ground Zero.

Nagasaki Catholics remember the A-bomb in particular ways, as I show in my research on memory in Nagasaki. My work has involved interviewing nine Catholic survivors of the atomic bombing, as well as three other non-Catholic survivors, and members of the Urakami community.

The Catholic interviewees explained that their grandparents had been exiled to other regions of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s due to their return to Catholicism after 250 years of “hidden Christianity”.

One interviewee, Matsuo Sachiko, explained that her grandmother was a double survivor, having first survived the Christian exile (referred to as the 4th exile) imposed by the government in 1867-73 and then later, the 1945 atomic bombing. She says:

Bombing survivors
“Yes… my grandmother was one of the Urakami Fourth Exile survivors and at that time there were still some of those survivors who were alive… these people still believed, everyone was able to stick at it and get through… Within their testimony, they didn’t talk about their pain.”

Orphaned Ozaki Tōmei adopted a new name after the bombing, as a novice at a Polish monastery in Nagasaki. Normally Japanese monks would adopt the name of a Western saint, but he selected a Japanese saint, Ozaki Tōmei, who is a child martyr of 1597 from Nagasaki.

Ozaki remembered his mother telling him that the 26 martyrs of 1597 were marched directly past his childhood home in the middle of winter on the way to their execution.

The child martyr Ozaki had been separated from his mother and was marched to Nagasaki from Kyoto. Along the way, he was able to write a letter to his mother, in which he reflected on the “transience of the world”.

My informant Ozaki linked his own experience to this boy of 1597, writing:

“The experience of the atomic bombing was exactly like that. Everything in the world is breakable and vanishes. As far as the atom bomb went, there was nothing to be known of reality which was not destroyed.

“Koware-iku sonzai ni tayotte wa naranai. We cannot depend on a life so fragile. Nonetheless, after that, staring at reality, what I saw was the indestructible God’s existence.

“The Lord God who holds all created things, the source of love and life is the God I know. This is also the source of faith.”

Tragic loss
Despite the destruction around him and the tragic loss of his mother, Ozaki, orphaned monk and survivor of the atomic bombing, held on to the faith of his ancestors.

His resilience might be considered one fruit of the missionaries whose ambivalent lives are depicted by Scorsese in Silence. Ozaki turned 88 this year and continues to write prolifically on his blog.

Silence was originally controversial among Christians in Japan for the perceived faithlessness of its priest protagonists. Nevertheless, Scorsese’s film version – which has taken 27 years to make – is eagerly awaited in Nagasaki, where the descendants of the hidden Christians still continue to be a practising community of faith.

The 26 Martyrs’ Museum, just down the road from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, frequently posts updates on the progress and making of the movie on its blog.

Meanwhile, another interviewee, Matsuzono (a pseudonym) told me:

“Soon Martin Scorsese will release the movie, so the things we locals talk about will spread around the world…”

Gwyn McLelland is an oral historian and associate, Japanese history, Monash University. He is currently completing his PhD dissertation at Monash University on the basis of oral history interviews conducted amongst Catholic survivors of the atomic bombing. He was the beneficiary of a Japan Study Grant from the National Library of Australia in 2015. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.