Religious Liberty Isn’t a Given in Kathy Hochul’s New York

T he Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne exist to love patients as Christ Himself in their Rosary Hill Home in the suburbs of New York City. With assisted suicide going into effect in Kathy Hochul’s Empire State, that seems to mean: to crucify Him again.

Day One for the euphemistically named Medical Aid in Dying law is August 5. Unless attempts to have the law halted or declared unconstitutional are successful, it puts the Catholic nuns in an impossible position: presenting and participating in assisted suicide as an option for their patients.

The Hawthorne Dominicans have a 42-bed nursing home where they provide free care for patients dying of cancer. They’ve been in operation for 125 years since the community was founded by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, known most famously for The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables. Rose was a convert to Catholicism and took the religious name Mother Mary Alphonsa upon founding her community, formerly known as the Dominican Sisters, Congregation of St. Rose of Lima.

After hearing about a seamstress who died alone of cancer, Rose considered God calling her to provide free care to the terminally ill. “A fire was then lighted in my heart, where it still burns . . . I set my whole being to endeavor to bring consolation to the cancerous poor.”

She started out with two rooms on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and declared that she would “take the lowest class both in poverty and suffering (the cancerous poor) and put them in such a condition, that if our Lord knocked at the door we would not be ashamed to show what we had done.” As the ministry grew and the Rosary Hill Home was established in 1901, Mother Mary Alphonsa established that the sisters: “must make our guests glad they crossed the threshold that is to be their last boundary. We must make them as comfortable and happy as if their own people had kept them and put them into the very best bedroom.”

Their home offers palliative care to cancer patients who have exhausted treatment options or opted for none and are in financial need.

To this day, the sisters are so wedded to the call to charity that not only do they not charge fees or take insurance or government assistance, but also: Even if a family wants to provide a donation for the care they provide, the sisters will not accept a donation in thanksgiving for a patient’s care until 20 years have passed.

They are Catholic, in other words. The sisters are the primary caregivers, and all other employees agree to operate in accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church and values of the sisters. They neither hasten death nor prolong it unnecessarily with extraordinary means. They care for the whole person, and sometimes that means patients’ health improves while they are there, because love and prayer have been known to do that.

The sisters believe assisted suicide is evil, as the Catholic Church does. To participate in it would be evil and a scandal — regardless of what New York State mandates.

The Hawthorne Dominicans, along with three other groups of nuns, a Catholic bishop, diocese, and health-care system, are pleading with New York to halt the implementation of the law and to declare it unconstitutional or, at the very least, exempt them from the mandates in it that are simply impossible for them to follow. (The other sisters include The Little Sisters of the Poor, who might as well add defending religious liberty to their charism — even after winning at the Supreme Court, they are still in court over health-care mandates for contraception and abortion-inducing drugs.)

Becket, the religious-liberty non-profit law firm — with an impressive record defending religious liberty at the Supreme Court at a time of government overreach on all levels, around the country — is representing the plaintiffs in New York.

Becket explains how: “The MAID Act exempts individual healthcare providers and healthcare facilities from certain, but not all, of the MAID Act’s requirements.” They point out that: “Individual physicians could still be required to inform, counsel, and qualify patients for assisted suicide; private healthcare facilities could still be prevented from prohibiting physicians from informing, counseling, and qualifying on-premises, or even prescribing off-premises; and assisted living homes could still be required to allow their patients to kill themselves in their facilities.”

The New York law goes beyond states well-known for their extremism on assisted suicide. Unlike California, Oregon, and Washington State, New York “requires doctors to affirmatively raise assisted suicide with their terminally ill patients,” Becket indicates in its complaint to the attorney general of New York, Letitia James. “New York’s religious exemptions are also among the narrowest in the nation.” Those aforementioned states also “allow religious healthcare providers and facilities to opt out of all participation in assisted suicide, if that is what their faith requires.” In New York under MAID, however, “[t]he many New York nurse practitioners, doctors, mental health professionals, hospitals, and care homes with religious or moral objections to participating in assisted suicide will have nowhere to go, because New York’s purported ‘opt-out’ is among the narrowest in the nation, and doesn’t apply at all to independent assisted living facilities.”

“The Catholic patients who wish to die without being offered the chance to kill themselves at their lowest moment will be left out in the cold,” the court filing emphasizes.

None of this is constitutional. New York is violating the First Amendment five times over, in fact, Becket argues.

For the 250th anniversary of the Founding of the United States of America, the first pope born in the U.S. sent a letter to us, highlighting: “Also among the principles that have guided the development of this country is the God-given dignity of every human life, each person being endowed with an inherent worth that calls for reverence, protection and care. In this spirit, a full understanding of this dignity leads to recognizing the importance of safeguarding human life from its beginning at conception until natural death, and of building a society in which the vulnerable, the suffering and the forgotten are always met with compassion, solidarity and love.”

If America 250 means anything, it means nuns in New York cannot be coerced into participating in the evil of assisted suicide. Will the Empire State protect their religious freedom — and the freedom of patients and families who want their truly Catholic care — or punish them for serving God and the suffering with loving freedom?

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.