In an interview with the Catholic Herald, Martin Scorsese describes his response to being ejected from the seminary as a young man. He says: “When one has a vocation, does it have to be clerical? Can’t you act out those tenets of whatever you believe in your own life without wearing a priest’s collar?”
Scorsese’s films are not always great, but they are reliably Catholic in some way, small or large. From the quasi-religious obsession of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver to the controversial humanization of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, faith is a stubborn monkey on his back. His latest film, Silence (based on the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo), is about two 17th-century Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who travel to Japan to find their incommunicado mentor (Liam Neeson) who might be dead or lost, or who might have had his soul and spirit crushed by the violently inhospitable officials.