LINDEN, VIRGINIA — About an hour and a half’s drive from the White House, a cloistered nun tells me, from behind the grille that separates her physically from the world, about the freedom of her life.

Outside, St. Dominic’s Monastery is nestled in fog overlooking the Shenandoah Valley, as I talk to her downstairs in a meeting room made for such encounters with family, friends and inquisitors.

She explains to me how one “can live externally free, but internally bound.” In the monastery, these contemplative nuns live in utter transparency with God and one another, even as they spend most of their days wrapped in total silence. Their vocal cords are mostly used for the set prayers of their life together, although there also is designated time for recreation and the needs of community life.

Her comment brings to mind a sentence in a book about modern martyrs by Robert Royal: “Willingness to die liberates.”

The nun in the cloister has chosen a kind of death to the world, certainly the world most of us operate in. She does so quite radically.

No Freedom Without Truth

At the monastery, we’re not all that far from Dulles airport. So, my thoughts wander — it can happen when you discover that the Wi-Fi doesn’t work in the basement of the monastery where your guest quarters are — to Avery Dulles, the Catholic cardinal who was the son of former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for whom the airport is named, and an article he wrote about freedom and truth. In it, he quoted Pope John Paul II, a saint who fought for freedom in his personal life and 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.”

That’s why religious freedom matters, because it’s the greatest gift that does the greatest honor to humanity — restoring its dignity, like fireworks.

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 our freedom.

Royal also writes about truth in his Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century. In part by way of explaining his above remark about death and liberation, he writes: “Martyrs do more than entertain various possibilities; they put their lives behind the truth.” He quotes from Bishop James Edward Walsh, a missionary in China who spent nearly two decades in captivity: “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 missionaries out to preach it, it is well to get ready for some explosions.”

Why Religious Freedom Matters

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, the pope told his weekly Wednesday crowd at St. Peter’s Square how 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.”

“The martyrs who even today lay down their lives for the faith do so out of love,” Pope Francis 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 his book about 20th-century martyrs so that their examples would not go unnoticed and so that we would see Christianity at its truest, at its most liberating. The monastery in Linden may not be the best spot for Fourth of July fireworks viewing — 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 — in which the issue of religious freedom plays a part — to consider what it is about religion that we need and what about it is worth so many different kinds of radical sacrifice.

It was just about a year ago that Pope Francis was in John Paul II’s native land, Poland. In the days before his visit, I went to Auschwitz accompanied by nuns, 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 everyone know that they’re loved, can live in that love and give it to others. That’s why religious freedom matters, because 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 some respite from the kinds we are plagued by.

COPYRIGHT 2017 United Feature Syndicate