A group of Catholic nuns is battling the state of New York, which wants to take an LGBT hammer to a home that has cared for terminal cancer patients for almost 125 years.
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne operate the 42-bed Rosary Hill Home, which cares for terminally ill people without charging them anything, according to EWTN.
But the sisters have broken the state commandment that declares pronouns are more important than prayer and that gender identity should determine who is a man or woman, not God-given biology.
State officials have said the nuns broke the rules by “refusing to assign a room to a resident other than in accordance with the resident’s gender identity,” “prohibiting a resident from using a restroom available to other persons of the same gender identity,” and “willfully and repeatedly failing to use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns.”
But the nuns have gone to court rather than bow to the state.
“I think the most important thing is that we are adamant in keeping our Catholic identity. Without that, there’s no purpose for us to do what we’re doing,” Mother Marie Edward, OP, the superior of the religious congregation, said.
The suit claims the state’s edict violates the First Amendment. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and four state administrators in the state Department of Health are being sued.
“Over 125 years, as far as they know, they’ve never once had a patient who was wanting to make the gender journey, to transition. And that’s significant, because why are we going through this?” L. Martin Nussbaum, the sisters’ lawyer, said.
“This law imposed on the Dominican Hawthorne Sisters is a form of gender ideology virtue signaling, to require these sisters to be trained in an ideology entirely contrary to Catholic belief.”
“Why are we doing this? We don’t even have such patients,” Nussbaum said. “It’s the state requiring these holy nuns to bend the knee to an ideology contrary to their faith.”
Mother Marie Edward, who joined the congregation in 1979, views the battle as a challenge in which good will prevail
“I’m not really worried, because I know the Lord is going to take care of us,” she said.
“Christ is the center, and the Eucharist sustains us. But Christ is also, as he said, the way, the truth, and the life. And if he’s the truth, then we cannot practice what we do, incorporating something that is an untruth,” she said.
“And it is an untruth to say that a male should go into a female patient’s room. You’re just trying to contort things, for whatever reason. So we have to stand by the truth of what has been taught to us in the natural law. It is not to be changed,” she said.
“New York’s Mandate demands that the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne abandon their religious beliefs or abandon their 125-year mission of mercy to the dying poor,” according to the lawsuit, which noted that facilities operated by Christian Scientists are exempt from the state law, but not Catholic-run facilities.
“Plaintiffs’ beliefs and practices about care for the sick, elderly poor are inseparable from their respect for human beings’ sexual identities,” the lawsuit said, adding, “Denying the givenness of male and female, and the family based upon this reciprocal relationship of opposite sexes, thus obscures a central image of God and the command of love at the heart of Christianity. It also destroys the anthropological basis for the family, society’s source of life, health, stability and progress.”
“Reason naturally affirms faith on this matter, because God is the author of all reason and creation. Sex is inscribed into every cell in the human body. ‘Transgender medicine’ can change surface appearance but never sex. And Scripture forbids lying to another about reality,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit noted that it is not only the nuns who are impacted by the state law.
“Requiring a person to identify another by a sex other than his or her God-gifted sex would therefore require such a person to act against central, unchangeable and architectural teachings of the Catholic faith. It would contradict the teachings of the Bible concerning God’s creative sovereignty, contradict reason and truth, and betray our sacred obligation not to knowingly harm other persons, particularly the most vulnerable,” the lawsuit said.
“The implications are so much greater than whether to utter the words ‘he’ or ‘she.’ Indeed, to demand that a Catholic deny another’s sex is to require him or her to affirm another religious worldview,” the lawsuit said.
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