Are We Listening?

I sat in on parts of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences annual plenary session last week and heard what amounted to a warning to America: Don’t go the way of secularism. That’s what this fight over religious liberty we are in amounts to.

In my syndicated column this week, I write:

To an American sitting in on the conference, some of its sessions amounted to a warning siren. A “religion of humanity” has taken hold of supposedly enlightened opinion and increasingly guides the judgments and actions, private and public, of people in the West, especially in Europe, cautioned Pierre Manent, a professor at the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron. Manent continued,

This is not simply a fashion or opinion trend; it is a genuine large-scale project for governing the world through international rules and institutions, so that nations, losing their character as sovereign political bodies, are henceforth only ‘regions’ of a world en route to globalization, that is, unification. And, as formerly in the Communist conception of history, the is and the ought are regarded as coinciding: If you doubt that globalization is desirable, you will be told that it is irresistible and that you refuse to see reality; if you doubt that it is irresistible, you will be told that it is desirable and that you reject the evidence of the Good. In brief, ‘the world’ is presented to us as the supremely legitimate object of our desire. Such a proposition requires a serious effort of discernment.

“A religion of the absence of God is currently destroying and demoralizing the West,” Manent summed up.

More here.