This past week, Pope Francis met with a delegation of European rabbis. This meeting continued the developing dialogue between Catholic and Jewish leaders that intensified following the Second Vatican Council and that was strongly supported by Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. The closeness of Pope Francis to the Jewish community in Argentina has been widely reported.

In the midst of his talk to the rabbis, Pope Francis expressed his grave concern about the spiritual situation in Europe. What he said could, sadly, apply to the United States as well.

He commented, “In a society increasingly marked by secularism and threatened by atheism, we run the risk of living as if God did not exist. People are often tempted to take the place of God, to consider themselves the criterion of all things, to control them, to use everything according to their own will.”

The constant march to societal secularism is unrelenting. It has been joined with the seemingly benign concept of tolerance. Who could be opposed to tolerance?

But then, tolerance began to be separated from faith, or reason. Suddenly, public prayer became an imposition. It certainly had to disappear from our public schools.

The public mention of God, except in a most superficial and generic fashion, such as in campaign speeches, became a sign of backwardness or contemporary fundamentalism.

On this trajectory, tolerance could only be fostered by the exclusion of God from polite society. The benefits flowing from a society that recognized the hand of God in its midst — benefits like strong families, moral cohesion and historical charitable works such as hospitals, hospices and schools — become ignored.

Religion and the practice of faith then come to be portrayed as divisive. Only the absence of God is held to be true tolerance. And so faith and its practice is relegated to being itself only tolerated, provided its adherents do so privately, like a hobby.

It is not hard to identify this evolution in our own beloved country, as well as in Europe. And its context has been the sexual revolution that has taken place over the last five decades or so. The decoupling of sexuality from its family and child-bearing purpose, leaving only the search for pleasure, in marriage or not, is now almost a societal given. Look at our films, or television, or our politics.

Because the moral voice of faith has constantly called for the use of sexuality with respect for God’s plan built into our nature, all the more reason to silence the teaching of faith.

Pope Francis notes that in the spiritual life, as in nature, a vacuum is abhorred. We run the risk now of living, or trying to live, as if God did not exist. If that were even possible, what or who would take the place of God?

As the Holy Father notes, it is the age-old human temptation to make ourselves the center and the arbiter of all things. Rather than accepting gratefully the world around us as God’s creation, with its mysteries and limitations reflected in our moral lives, the world becomes a source of unfettered human experimentation. The attitude becomes “if we can do it, there is no reason we shouldn’t do it.”

In that context, right and wrong, what is moral or immoral is said to come not from reference to God, but reference to ourselves. Morality then becomes unstable, changeable depending upon what the majority of people decide at any given time. And when that happens, the weak and vulnerable need to beware.

The warning of the Holy Father goes to the heart of our contemporary struggle to defend the freedom of religion. What was a founding principal of our country and our society, that government should not infringe upon our religious freedom of conscience, is now being reduced from a right to an accommodation, a grant from our government. The imposition of mandates upon our Catholic health care and senior care institutions to violate our moral principles is based in this understanding.

Pope Francis’ words are very timely. We must, as followers of Christ, entrusted with faith in Him, be willing to stand up and to witness to the presence of God in our life and in our lives. We must acknowledge that life in this world is part of God’s plan to call us to life eternal with Him.

It is important that we witness to these things in our own hearts and consciences. But the world needs to see and hear our witness as well.