Religious freedom in the US is under “dramatic and immediate threat” a leading Catholic bishop has said.

In a speech to the General Assembly of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Archbishop William Lori referred to a range of challenges to the conscience rights in the public square.

Archbishop Lori, who is chairman of the USCCB’s Ad-Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, said that the bishops had been viewing “with growing alarm the ongoing erosion of religious liberty in our country”.

“There is no religious liberty if we are not free to express our faith in the public square and if we are not free to act on that faith through works of education, health care and charity,” Lori said in his first address to the bishops as chairman of the newly formed Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Explaining the bishops’ decision last June to make religious liberty one of their top priorities as a conference, he said, “Among the challenges we see is a pattern in culture and law to treat religion merely as a private matter between an individual and his or her God”.

He added: “Instead of promoting toleration of differing religious views, some laws, some court decisions, some administrative regulations treat religion not as a contributor to our nation’s common morality but rather as a divisive and disruptive force better kept out of public life.”

The bishops’ decision to make religious liberty a high priority was triggered by two recent policy decisions by the Obama administration.

The first was a new requirement that virtually all U.S. employers must include in their health insurance packages the full range of reproductive services legally available under federal law — including abortion, artificial contraception and contraceptive services that the church regards morally as abortions or at least in some cases abortifacient — with no additional charge to their insurees.

The new HHS requirement includes a narrowly defined religious exemption that would require almost all Catholic church employers either to terminate all health insurance for their employees or to violate church teachings in order to comply with the regulation.

Currently most religious organizations are free to enact health care insurance plans that specify that certain areas of health care coverage are not acceptable to the employer’s religious beliefs — notably among Catholic employers, artificial contraceptives and abortions.

The new regulation would require changes in those insurance plans to include coverage of abortion and artificial birth control.

The second Obama administration was a recently institute requirement that faith-based social service agencies cannot obtain federal funds to support their services unless they include the full range of reproductive services that federal law allows.

That new federal funding requirement led in October to HHS halting its funding of a widely hailed and successful USCCB program fighting human trafficking on grounds that the Migration and Refugee Services program did not provide contraceptive services to the human trafficking victims.

The ACLU had begun a lawsuit against the legality of the federal government’s contract with USCCB on the basis of the programme’s failure to provide contraceptive services.

According to the US Catholic paper, the National Catholic Reporter, sources close to the USCCB believe that the administration’s move was not a decision based on religious freedom or current federal laws on that topic, but an adoption of a new public policy view that accepts an ACLU perspective on religious liberty.

Archbishop Lori said that one of the biggest challenges to religious freedom was “a pattern in culture and law to treat religion merely as a private matter between an individual and his or her God”.

“Instead of promoting toleration of differing religious views, certain laws, court decisions, and administrative regulations treat religion not as a contributor to our nation’s common morality but rather as a divisive and disruptive force better kept out of public life.

“Some invoke the so-called doctrine of separation of church and state to exclude the Church from public policy, thus ignoring the historic role of churches in ending slavery, in securing civil rights, in promoting just labor practices, including the introduction of child labor laws.

He added that while religion was “indeed a personal matter,it is not a private matter, for there is no religious liberty if we are not free to express our faith in the public square and if we are not free to act on that faith through works of education, health care, and charity”

He added: “Aggressive secularism is also a system of belief. In failing to accommodate people of faith and religious institutions, both law and culture are indeed establishing un-religion as the religion of the land and granting it the rights and protections that our Founding Fathers envisioned for citizens who are believers and for their churches and church institutions.

“In addition, over time, the barriers preventing government from interfering in the internal life of religious groups have been lowered.”

Such an attitude “aids and abets the erosion of religious liberty,” Archbishop Lori said.

He said: “Refusal to endorse the taking of innocent human life or to redefine marriage is now portrayed as discriminatory. As a result, the freedom of religious entities to provide services according to their own lights, to defend publicly their teachings, and even to choose and manage their own personnel is coming under increased attack.”