Bend the Knee or Close: New York vs. the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne

Dominican Sisters push back against New York's ideological coercion

The dying poor have almost no one. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have spent more than a century that someone, taking in cancer patients who are broke, uninsured, and out of options, accompanying them to their final reward without issuing an invoice.

Now the state of New York wants to tell them how to run their facility. The state is demanding they assign patient rooms by gender identity, use patients’ preferred pronouns, and submit staff to mandatory ideological training — comply or lose the license that keeps Rosary Hill Home open.

The Sisters are pushing back. They recently filed a federal lawsuit against Governor Kathy Hochul after receiving several warning letters from the New York State Department of Health. Refusing to violate or even pretend to violate Catholic teaching on the nature and dignity of the human person, the Dominican Sisters are taking their stand in federal court.

Here’s the detail that should stop you cold: the state’s own records show zero complaints against Rosary Hill Home. Not one. To their knowledge, the sisters have never even had a transgender patient. So no harm being remedied here yet the state is using a law—passed with almost no debate—to pressure a Catholic institution into affirming a worldview directly contrary to the Catholic faith.

That’s really what this comes down to. It isn’t about accommodation or inclusion, it’s about the state demanding that the nuns bend the knee—to formally affirm, in policy and in speech, a view of the human person that contradicts Catholic teaching. And it’s doing so in a facility where the situation the law is supposedly designed to address has never once actually occurred.

Catholics should recognize that this isn’t only compelled speech, it’s something closer to compelled endorsement. The state isn’t merely forcing these Sisters to mouth words they don’t believe. It’s conscripting a Catholic institution into the service of an ideology, so that the ideology can point to that institution and say: even they agree. Whether Albany intends that effect or not—and I believe that it does!—the result is the same. The Catholic Church’s moral authority gets leveraged to validate a claim the Catholic Church rejects. That’s not accommodation. That’s appropriation.

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The Sisters are not asking for the right to mistreat people. What they are refusing is the demand that they reorganize the care of the dying around a secular ideological framework and formally declare their agreement with it. This is clear coercion. And these sisters are having none of it.

The Sisters know what it means to serve God rather than seek the approval of those who would compel them to do otherwise. St. Peter writes: “For it is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.'“ St. Paul is even more direct: 'Am I trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.' That is the ground the Dominican Sisters are standing on.

Pray for these Sisters. And take a lesson from them — because the pressure they are facing in federal court is the same pressure the rest of us are feeling in our workplaces, our schools, and our parishes, in quieter but no less real ways. They are not bending the knee. Neither should we. Only at the name of Jesus should every knee bend. God be with you all.

One last thing! I’ll be recording a monologue discussing this further. Subscribe to The Forge to be notified when it drops.

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