Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne care for a dying cancer patient at Rosary Hill Home

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne in New York are challenging the LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights, passed by the New York legislature and signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in November 2023. The law requires long-term care facilities to allow patients to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, requires staff to address patients according to their preferred pronouns, and extends the right to patients to be housed in rooms consistent with their gender identity, which would mean a biological male sharing a room with a biological female, or vice verse. The law also requires facilities to post signs indicating that the care facility does not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, or HIV status. Staff are also required to undergo cultural competency training every two years.

The Church of Christ Scientists requested from the State and received an opt-out exemption to the law. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have also requested an exemption, but have yet to hear anything from the State on their request. So the Sisters filed their suit. The Sisters are joined in their suit by the Department of Justice, who has said that the law violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which protects religious groups from being forced by law to act in ways counter to their religious convictions. Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, provided a statement: “States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology. For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days. New York’s law would force these religious women to choose between their faith and their license if they wish to continue serving the dying.”

According to the website https://hawthorne-dominicans.org/, “The Congregation of Saint Rose of Lima was founded in 1900 by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, (Mother Mary Alphonsa), the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rose was a convert to Catholicism and in searching for a way to serve God and the poor began her work of caring for incurable cancer patients on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As consecrated religious, we live our consecration first through the daily Liturgy of the Eucharist, our daily liturgical prayer, our common apostolate and our lifelong study.” The Dominican Sisters operate Rosary Hill Home, a 42-bed facility in Hawthorne, in the town of Mount Pleasant in Westchester County, about thirty miles north of Manhattan. They care for cancer patients in their last days, providing comfort and love to those who are transitioning from this temporal life to the eternal life. They do this at no cost and have done so for more than 120 years.

The Sisters have received three letters from New York’s public health agency, warning them against “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 pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns.” Keep in mind that, while the average number of complaints against nursing home facilities is in double digits, according to the health.data.ny.gov website, there have been no complaints lodged againt Rosary Hill Home. Zero. So, who exactly is the state of New York claiming to protect? People who seem utterly satisfied with the care they receive? L. Martin Nussbaum, the attorney representing the Sisters, said, “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? 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.”

The Catholic Church has been caring for the sick since the first years of her existence. For twenty centuries the Church has provided nursing care, hospitals, hospices, clinics and a whole variety of care to the infirm, including those who could pay nothing for the care they received. All of this was inspired by the words of Jesus, “For I was ill and you cared for me” (Mt 25:36). Somehow, since getting involved in caring for the poor and infirm just in the last century or so, the State has decided that it knows better how to provide care for those in need of it. In the mind of the State, care for the dying is not the priority. What is the priority is affirming the ideology of those extremist who demand that everyone bend to their view of the world, even when their view of the world is not consistent with reality. The State will happily shut down all facilities that provide genuine care for those in need if they refuse to adopt the pretense of gender ideology. No matter that these people will have no where to go. No matter that they will no longer receive the excellent, loving care of the Sisters. What matters is that we all sign up for the game of make-believe, even at the expense of the patients the State pretends to care for.

To think that this has all transpired in a little less than two decades. That is a blink of the eye in human history. Until just yesterday no one considered that people, including children as young as five, could choose their gender, any more than they could choose their height, their race, or the way their heart pumps blood. Anyone would have been considered mad had they attempted to traverse society as a gender other than the one they were born, nevermind any one of the seemingly endlessly growing number of gender identities. And then to demand, and be respected in that demand by the highest authorities in the land, that everyone else play along – at pain of breaking the law! Even the field of medicine, the last outpost of objective reality in the secular world, has succumbed to the rules of this new game.

When will we reach a bridge too far? When will the gender ideologues push the envelope past the point of society’s willingness to tolerate the pretense, to give credence to the lie, to subjugate truth to the feelings of the mentally ill? When will we decide that those who suffer gender dysphoria need our help and not our compliance? Likely when it starts impacting the wallets of those who are pushing the agenda. I don’t mean the ideologues themselves. They don’t care about money. I mean the politicians, the corporations, the sports authorities, the medical associations, etc. When people stop electing politicians who demand sex-change operations for children, when people stop buying the products of companies that promote the destabilization of truth, when athletes refuse to line up at the starter’s gate, and when people call to the carpet the doctors who have betrayed their oaths and their patients.

The transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty are under attack in the most incidious way. Truth is denied by pretending that men are women and women are men. Goodness is rejected by prioritizing ideology over care, by threatening those who care with being shut down unless they deny the truth. Beauty is trampled on by the ugliness of those who would turn the human person into a means to the end of a social and political agenda. We must stand against this tide, even if it costs us everything. Nothing is worth the loss of our souls. That is what gender ideology and its supporting cast are demanding of us: nothing less than the surrender of our souls. We must stand strong. We must stand for truth, goodness, and beauty. To do otherwise is to deny our Lord, who is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. To Him be all glory, and honor, and worship. Amen!

Be Christ for all. Bring Christ to all. See Christ in all.