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Inner liberty may be the most important and most radical freedom of all.

Linden, Va. — About an hour and a half away from the White House, a cloistered nun tells me — from behind the grille that separates her physically from the world (even from a friendly visitor like me) — about what freedom she lives.

Outside, above the Shenandoah Valley, fog envelops St. Dominic’s Monastery as I talk to her downstairs in a meeting room made for encounters with family and friends and inquisitors (usually young women who are discerning a vocation to this way of life).


She explains to me how “you can live externally free but internally bound.” In the monastery, these contemplative nuns live in utter transparency to God and one another, even in their many hours of silence each day. Their vocal chords are used the most for the set prayers of their life together, although there also is designated time for recreation and addressing the needs of community life.

Her comment brings to mind a favorite devotion of Pope Francis’s (before he was Pope Francis) to Mary, Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. I think, too, of a sentence in Robert Royal’s Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: “Willingness to die liberates.”

The nun in the cloister has chosen a kind of death to the world, certainly the world in which most of us operate. She does so quite radically. Her choice provides a spotlight on the kind of lives Christians true to the name choose to live, as they believe they are called to live.



At the monastery, we’re not all that far from Dulles airport. So my thoughts wander. That can happen in an unusually pleasant way when you discover that the WiFi doesn’t work — as it does not in the basement of the monastery where my guest quarters are. I think about Avery Dulles, the Catholic cardinal who was the son of former secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and about an article he wrote on freedom and truth. He quoted Pope John Paul II, a saint who not only knew about freedom but fought for it in his personal life and in history-changing ways on the world stage: “For freedom on the one hand is for the sake of truth and on the other hand it cannot be perfected except by means of truth. Hence the words of our Lord, which speak so clearly to everyone: ‘The truth will make you free’ (John 8:32). There is no freedom without truth.”

Just days before the Independence Day holiday, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “post-truth” to its mix — an entry to put us on guard about freedom.

Royal also writes about truth in his book about 20th-century martyrs. In part by way of explaining his remark about death and liberation, he writes: “Martyrs do more than entertain various possibilities; they put their lives behind the truth.” He goes on to quote from Bishop James Edward Walsh, a Maryknoll missionary in China who spent nearly two decades in captivity. Walsh asserted:

Christianity is not a private way of salvation and a guide to a pious life; it is a way of world salvation and a philosophy of total life. This makes it a sort of dynamite. So when you send missioners out to preach it, it is well to get ready for some explosions.


The word “martyr,” like religion itself, has had its manipulations. During a week that marked the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul and other early Church martyrs, Pope Francis told his weekly Wednesday crowd at St. Peter’s Square that the martyrs are icons of hope. They imitate Christ’s self-sacrifice and love. They are what this world needs, “a witness to the sure hope that faith inspires.”

Religious freedom matters — it’s the greatest gift that does the greatest honor to humanity: restoring its dignity.

“The martyrs who even today lay down their lives for the faith do so out of love,” he said. “By their example and intercession, may we become ever more convincing witnesses, above all in the events of our daily lives, to our undying hope in the promises of Christ.”


Royal wrote the book so that the lives of so many would not go unnoticed — and so that we would see Christianity at its truest, most liberating. The monastery in Linden may not be the best spot for viewing Fourth of July fireworks — you’re not going to find a TV to watch, even in the priest’s apartment. But it is a place to take a few hours away from the constant headline bombardment, including headlines about religious freedom, to consider what it is about religion that we need, and why it’s worth giving a life for it in so many different, radical ways.

It was just about a year ago that Pope Francis was in John Paul II’s native land. In the days before, I went to Auschwitz, accompanied by other religious sisters, the Sisters of Life, some of New York’s finest. They were walking, praying contrasts to the brutality still in the air there, a community of women dedicated to helping all know that they are loved and can live that love and give it to others. That’s why religious freedom matters — it’s the greatest gift that does the greatest honor to humanity: restoring its dignity, like fireworks. An explosion of the kind we need for respite from the kind that plagues us.


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