Are we done bullying nuns yet?
Apparently not, as evidenced by a new lawsuit in New York.
And it’s not actually “we”; it’s left-wing ideologues doing the bullying.
Fresh off spending more than a decade trying to make the Little Sisters of the Poor — an order of nuns that run nursing homes for the destitute poor — pay for things like abortion pills in their healthcare plans, they have turned their attention to a different order of nuns that care for the most vulnerable.
This time they’ve trained their eye on the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, New York, who for more than 100 years have run Rosary Hill home — a home for indigent cancer hospice patients. I dare you look at some of their photos without crying. Men and women, who would otherwise be in goodness knows what conditions, facing their final hours on earth accompanied by the gentle, beaming faces and embraces of nuns who have given their lives to serve them.
The Hawthorne sisters are now in legal jeopardy because they cannot in good faith comply with an absurd and clearly targeted new law in New York entitled the “LGTBQ Long-Term Care (LTC) Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights.” The law requires the sisters to re-do their bathrooms to comply with the demands of gender ideology, along with other gender silliness like pronoun rules, which so obviously do not square with the demands of their faith. They’ve received multiple threatening letters from the Hochul administration despite zero complaints and now find themselves taken away from their patients to fight it out in court.
It’s nun v. woke ideologues Groundhog Day.
The left has been doing this to the Little Sisters of the Poor for going on fourteen years now. If you thought their case was settled by the Supreme Court years ago, think again. They continue to battle for the right to serve the elderly poor according to the tenets of their faith in California and Pennsylvania, where even presidential ambition is not stopping Governor Josh Shapiro from his unending and creepy campaign to rope nuns into reproductive matters.
The left’s weird hangup with nuns, however, is just a part of a larger pattern of their efforts to conscript Catholics into carrying their radical, ideological water, be it efforts to conscript Catholic hospitals and healthcare workers into performing procedures that violate church teaching, Catholic schools into hiring teachers that openly flout Catholic theology, or Catholic parents into subjecting their children to radical gender ideology lessons.
And yet at the core of Catholic teaching on human sexuality is the very thing that compels these nuns to serve, a deep understanding of and appreciation for the dignity of every person, made in the image of God. The Hawthorne sisters, like the Little Sisters before them, have made it clear that it is their faith — the very thing that is under attack — that moves them to serve all their patients, ironically regardless of the whole litany of identities, including the gender identity of their patients.
“This is our strength,” one of the sisters said in an interview. “If our faith wasn’t there, the type of care we provide would not be the same.” “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,” their Mother Superior said.
The order was founded by Rose Hawthorne, daughter of the great American novelist Nathanial Hawthorne, who converted to Catholicism and on founding her order once said, “I set my whole being to endeavor to bring consolation to the cancerous poor.”
This is the likes of which Governors Hochul, Shapiro and friends can’t — in the name of tolerance — seem to tolerate.
Ashley McGuire is a Senior Fellow with The Catholic Association
