Vatican City — Are we who we say we are?

This is, or should be, the question of the hour — the question that ought to be at the center of our lives, drawing on and demonstrating our purpose.

All the more so now, during an election season in which the White House has instituted a policy that puts unprecedented limits on the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

A conference at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a Vatican think tank, yielded some related thoughts and warnings. The conference was convened in order to prepare for the 50th anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris. The Pontifical Academy was founded in 1994 and is meant to facilitate a continuing dialogue between faith and reason, and between the social sciences and the social thought of the Church. The latter provides — in the words of Mary Ann Glendon, president of the Pontifical Academy — “criteria for judgment” and “guidelines for action,” always keeping “the human person at the center of concern.”

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.

He sounded his alarm at the same time as a full-scale political discernment of budgetary matters was beginning in the United States. The House Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, has engaged in a debate over “social justice” that had long appeared to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Left.

This is both important and relevant. We live in a country that has long safeguarded religious freedom, believing it to be a good for the life of the nation. But current government policy suggests something else. President Obama and his administration have demonstrated a hostility to the free exercise of religion in the public square — except, that is, when it can be used to justify a policy dictated by the Left’s ideology regarding the size and scope of government.

Ryan, who has been criticized by some fellow Catholics, sees his plan as but a prudential application of the moral principles of the Church’s social teaching. He doesn’t claim, it’s important to note, that his program is the Catholic budget plan; rather, he reminds interlocutors that papal encyclicals don’t provide budgetary details, but focus instead on the human dignity that policies must respect.

Pacem in Terris was concerned with what Miss America candidates call “world peace.” But it recognizes that at the heart of any such endeavor is peace within our hearts, reconciliation about who we are. This involves authenticity about being discerning believers.

That reconciliation is naturally shared. “There is no more powerful source of moral development for everyone than concern for the common good or the res publica,” Manent explains. “It’s not a question here of generalizing norms of conduct, which could only produce a mechanical and mutilated morality, but rather of enlarging our being in order to take account of the intelligence and the will of that being which is greater than each one of us and that we form together.”

“The education and the deployment of the human virtues require the participation of a unified action regarding the members for which we feel ourselves responsible, and for which we incur both praise and blame,” he continues. “If we lose that, we will have nothing left to orient ourselves by but a general idea of humanity which will be powerless to draw us away from the passivity of private life.”

Alexis de Tocqueville would appreciate this rally to a renewal in our hearts and in civil society, making possible good stewardship in public policy. “If we keep growing government in debt, we will crowd out the civil society — those charities, those churches, those institutions in our local communities that do the most to actually have a human touch to help people in need,” Paul Ryan recently said, in defense of his budget. “That’s what we want to empower. That’s what we want to improve on.”

“I see it as one of the greatest ironies of this ironical time,” Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote, “that the Christian message renouncing the world should be withdrawn from consideration just when it is most desperately needed to save men’s reason, if not their souls. It is as though a Salvation Army band, valiantly and patiently waiting through the long years for Judgment Day, should, when it comes at last, and the heavens do veritably begin to unfold like a scroll, throw away their instruments and flee in terror.”

Serious moral discernment before we vote can make all the difference. And keeping the human person at the center of our civic acts is an important part of keeping our freedom intact. Will we heed the warnings?

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. This column is available exclusively through United Media.