New York archbishop joins religious sisters in suing state over assisted suicide law
New York Archbishop Ronald Hicks joined a lawsuit brought by Catholic bishops, religious orders, and healthcare organizations challenging the state’s assisted-suicide rules. The plaintiffs argue the rules could force Catholic institutions and caregivers to participate in assisted suicide, contrary to Church teaching on the sanctity of life. A federal court has temporarily barred New York from enforcing the rules against the Catholic plaintiffs while the lawsuit proceeds. Catholic objectors in Illinois have also secured court orders preventing enforcement of similar rules against them during their lawsuits.
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New York Archbishop Ronald Hicks has joined a lawsuit brought by Catholic religious orders and other church groups challenging the state’s assisted-suicide rules. The plaintiffs say the rules could compel them to participate in practices that conflict with Catholic teaching; a federal court has temporarily barred enforcement against the Catholic objectors while the case proceeds. 1
Hicks’s name was added to the case on Oct. 30, alongside that of Rockville Centre Bishop John Barres and several religious communities: the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. The New York Archdiocese joined a suit filed in July by Catholic objectors. 1
Hicks said Catholics are called to care for people in need, adding: “We refuse to allow New York to force us to harm the very ones we’ve been called to care for.” 1
The plaintiffs argue that New York’s assisted-suicide rules would force them to help patients who seek to end their lives, contrary to Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. A federal court ordered the state not to enforce the rules against the Catholic plaintiffs while the lawsuit is pending. 1
Catholic institutions in Illinois, including the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Diocese of Springfield, have also obtained federal-court orders temporarily blocking enforcement of that state’s assisted-suicide rules against them. The article says four bishops and dozens of religious sisters have brought lawsuits against the governments of New York and Illinois. 1
New York’s Catholic healthcare ministry ArchCare is also a plaintiff. Its facilities include Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, which provides hospice care for people with six months or less to live; Becket describes it as the only fully accredited U.S. acute-care hospital devoted exclusively to palliative care for adults with life-limiting illnesses. 1
Catholic ethics grounds conscience protections in healthcare
Catholic ethics grounds conscience protections in a duty to answer to moral truth—not simply in personal preference or a wish to avoid uncomfortable tasks. In healthcare, this matters when a professional or institution is asked to participate in an act judged gravely wrong, especially one that directly threatens innocent human life. Catholic teaching therefore calls for conscience to be respected and protected, while also insisting that it be formed responsibly and that the rights and genuine needs of patients be taken seriously.
In the Catholic view reflected in these texts, healthcare workers can face a conflict between professional expectations and their responsibility to protect human life. The Pontifical Academy for Life describes this as a risk of cooperating with evil in the course of professional duties, and calls conscientious objection a courageous response when legal norms provide for actions that threaten life. It specifically includes doctors, nurses, pharmacists, administrative personnel, and others whose work is directly involved in protecting human life.
This reasoning is not that a person may refuse any task merely because it feels objectionable. The moral question is whether the action requested would make the person participate in, or share the intention of, an act that violates moral law. Samaritanus bonus explains that formal cooperation occurs when someone shares the immoral intention behind an act; cooperation can also be direct when the person’s action, in its concrete context, amounts to participation in the act itself. The document says such cooperation cannot be justified simply because civil law permits or requires it.
The distinction matters: a conscience claim needs moral reasoning about the act and the worker’s role in it. Catholic teaching does not reduce conscience to sincerity alone. A healthcare worker’s objection is grounded, in these documents, in the duty not to participate in wrongdoing and the duty to serve and protect life.
The Church’s concern is not limited to a person’s inward judgment. If a worker must choose between violating conscience and abandoning a profession, the practical possibility of providing care consistent with moral convictions may be lost. John Paul II therefore identifies conscientious objection as a middle path between leaving the profession and compromising one’s convictions, and says it ought to be respected, especially by legislators. He also calls for training and professional practice that respect conscience “in law and in practice.”
Samaritanus bonus makes the public responsibility explicit: governments “must acknowledge the right to conscientious objection in the medical and healthcare field,” particularly where natural moral law and the service of life are at stake. It adds that, where objection is not recognized, a worker may face an obligation to disobey human law rather than compound a moral wrong.
On this account, protection is not merely a privilege for religious employees. It is also a safeguard against compelling people to act against serious moral obligations. A 2007 declaration from the Pontifical Academy for Life treats objection as relevant to a range of healthcare roles, not only clinicians performing procedures directly. The precise moral responsibility still depends on what a person is asked to do and how closely that action connects them to the disputed act.
Catholic teaching also addresses healthcare institutions. Samaritanus bonus calls on Catholic institutions to resist economic pressure to accept euthanasia, and describes Catholic healthcare facilities as signs of the Church’s care for the sick. It argues that society should help ensure that people who are incurably ill are not left without care because institutions face financial burdens for maintaining their moral commitments.
This institutional dimension matters because a facility’s mission and policies may be shaped by a coherent moral and religious identity, not just by the private beliefs of individual employees. But the supplied texts do not establish that every institutional conscience claim is legally recognized in every jurisdiction, nor do they settle how particular conflicts between an institution and patients or public authorities should be resolved. They state a moral and political case for protection, not a complete account of the law in every circumstance.
Catholic ethics does not treat freedom of conscience as an unlimited permission to disregard everyone else’s rights. A scholarly discussion of Catholic social teaching in the supplied materials says that rights must be exercised with regard for others and the common good, and cautions against “indiscriminate recourse” to conscientious objection. It also notes that a state may have a duty to protect citizens’ rights against abuses of claimed freedom.
That qualification does not erase the Church’s objection to compelling participation in acts it regards as immoral. Instead, it points to the need for careful judgments about the specific act, the worker’s role, and the patient’s care. In the case of euthanasia and assisted suicide, Samaritanus bonus rejects participation but insists that the sick person must be accompanied and cared for with genuine humanity until natural death. Its argument is therefore not that an objecting worker may abandon a patient; it is that care should be provided without collusion in the act being refused.
The central Catholic rationale is thus twofold: healthcare workers must not be forced to act against grave moral duties, and patients remain owed humane care. The sources strongly support the Church’s call for legal and professional protection of conscience, especially in matters involving human life. They do not, by themselves, provide a universal legal test for every objection or resolve every practical dispute over how to protect both conscience and patient care.