St. Rose of Lima was initially christened Isabel, after her doting grandmother. When the serving girl compared fair Isabel to the blossoms in the garden, proud mother Maria de Oliva y Flores immediately changed the baby’s name to Rose, touching off a lengthy power struggle between mother and grandmother.

Her father was a retired soldier of the Spanish conquistadors, and worked as a guard for the viceroy. He was twice the age of his fiery wife. Confused by the friction between her mother and grandmother, and gentle by nature, little Rosita made a hermitage, a retreat of green leaves and fragrance, off the beaten path of the garden proper. She had a gift for tending the fragile shoots, and gladly passed her days gardening and praying.

(Translated by William Johnston. NY: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1980. 294 pp.)
 
Less than a century after St. Francis Xavier introduced Jesus Christ to the Japanese, the number of Christians in Nagasaki totalled hundreds of thousands. In response to isolated rebellions, Japanese leaders decided to expel the Christian religion from the island. The preferred methods included many exceptionally cruel methods of drowning, bleeding to death and beheadings.

These martyrdoms increased the faith of the Christians initially, until the cruelties were coordinated to force priests to apostasize by torturing peasant Christians in their stead. Fr. Christovao Ferreira, a Portuguese provincial of the Society of Jesus, apostasized in 1632. This event serves as the setting and the historical backdrop to Shusaku Endo’s masterpiece, Silence.