This past week, the Supreme Court issued an important ruling concerning religious liberty.

While not deciding definitively, the court sent back to lower courts decisions which, up until now, had ruled that government can impose a legal obligation upon even the Little Sisters of the Poor to cooperate in providing contraceptive services that violate our Catholic faith.

Failure to comply would have forced these sisters, who give their lives in service to the elderly and dying, to pay fines estimated at $70 million annually.

The Supreme Court instructed the lower courts to revisit the cases and to encourage the two parties to the conflict — the government and religious organizations opposed to artificial contraception — to attempt to work out a compromise that respects the sisters’ freedom of religion.

That ruling offered at least a temporary support for the First Amendment of our Constitution protecting the freedom of religion. It also put brakes momentarily on the increasing use of government power to promote and even force social changes.

This case is of a very serious nature and has implications for all of us. In fact, it is of such concern that Pope Francis made an unscheduled stop to visit and encourage the Little Sisters during his recent visit to our country.

It is hard to avoid noticing that overwhelmingly the changes being promoted by the government are expansions of the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. In 1973, for example, the Supreme Court found the right to abortion hidden in “the penumbras” — the shaded areas — of the Constitution written by our Founding Fathers.

Since that time, people of good will and people of faith have fought a long and noble struggle to protect the life of the unborn and prevent the government from using taxpayer funds to pay for abortions.

This past June, in the decision entitled Bergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled that marriage is properly redefined by government so that it no longer means the union between a man and a woman, open to future generations, as reason and faith have always known.

As a result of that decision, levels of our government are moving to enforce complicity with this new and wrongful redefinition even by those who are committed to God’s plan for marriage as a matter of conscience.

Of late we have read in the news that the federal government is promoting the idea of our gender being a matter of personal decision independent of the anatomical reality that we bear. As a consequence, our schools, and therefore our children, are being confronted with the practical reality of sharing bathrooms with others who have concluded that they are transgendered.

Pope Francis sheds light on these issues by rooting them in our understanding of creation as a gift given to us from a wise and loving God.

Throughout his encyclical, Laudato Sì’, Pope Francis has reminded the world that we are always in relation to God and to His creation. Creation is a reality received by humanity, the pinnacle of creation.

“We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us,” (N. 67), the pope wrote.

The pope’s teaching has pointed out that we are living in a unique time. Our modern outlook denies the existence of God, or at least the notion that God created an order out of love for us that we do not create ourselves.

In so doing, we moderns deny that there is a reason and a purpose for everything in the world around us, which includes ourselves. Without God, we are simply accidents of fate existing in a world of random collections of molecules.

As a result, good or evil, right or wrong is not determined by the will of a loving God. It is, rather, a changeable set of current agreements arranged by the most powerful among ourselves.

But we know, as our faith has taught us for centuries and Pope Francis continues to proclaim today, God is the creator.

He has made this world. He gives each one of us our existence as male or female. Whichever gender He has given us, we participate in the complementarity of man and woman, a complementarity seen throughout creation.

We receive our gender as a gift that, joined to or interacting with the opposite gender, becomes a whole, benefitting ourselves and all of creation.

Part of that complementarity is the sacredness of the joining of male and female in a committed fashion that is open to generating and forming the future, new life. The sacredness of that joining is why faith and reason prize chastity. It is the reason that our Catholic faith sees sexuality as a beauty that must, simultaneously join the married man and woman and be always open to new life.

That is why contraception is contrary to the Church’s teachings. That is why being obligated to provide contraceptives is a violation of the consciences of the Little Sisters and an infringement upon freedom of religion.

That is why the Little Sisters are standing strong leading the way for all of us in testifying to the right of conscience and the freedom of religion in not providing contraceptive services.

The Little Sisters and Pope Francis and God’s creative plan — good company for all of us to keep.