It’s a safe bet that the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have garnered more news coverage in the past 125 days than they did in the preceding 125 years. That’s about how long they’ve quietly done the Lord’s work in upstate New York, compassionately caring for people with terminal illnesses at the order’s Rosary Hill home.

If the sisters sound familiar, it’s because it was only a few weeks ago when we last editorialized about them. At the time, they were pushing back against the state of New York’s instructions to use their patients’ “preferred pronouns” and not restrict rooms and bathrooms based on biological sex. The sisters were also reminded they must attend biennial “cultural competency” training sessions to go over these woke dictats.

It turns out that fending off the state’s gender-ideology police is the least of the sisters’ troubles. The state is now forcing them and other Catholic healthcare providers to be complicit in New York’s new physician-assisted suicide program, even though it flatly contradicts the tenets of their faith.

Once again, the sisters are fighting back. Along with four other Catholic plaintiffs, they have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act, which is set to take effect on Aug. 5. 

You’ll remember that it was a Catholic governor, Democrat Kathy Hochul, who signed this shameful measure into law. It made New York the 13th state, along with the District of Columbia, to legalize physician-assisted suicide — a deeply concerning trend to which many Catholics and pro-life Americans aren’t paying enough attention.

New York’s law may be the worst to date, because its religious exemption is so narrowly crafted that some religious orders don’t qualify for it, according to the plaintiffs’ complaint, which the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed on July 17.

Even those that meet the criteria aren’t exempt from having to inform their patients about their “right” to kill themselves and refer those who wish to do so to a physician willing to accommodate them.

And if the sisters refuse? The act calls for fines of up to $2,000 per violation, the potential revocation of a healthcare provider’s operating license, and even up to a year in prison for “willful” offenders.

“The sisters’ Catholic faith leads them to accept death as the natural end to a life well-lived: neither artificially prolonging it through burdensome technological and medical interventions that provide no reasonable benefit, nor artificially hastening it,” the lawsuit states.

“Above all,” the lawsuit adds, “it means that the sisters seek to personally provide a loving human presence alongside each person — bearing witness to the ending of a uniquely beautiful and unrepeatable life.”

We agree with Becket President Mark Rienzi, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, that it’s “unconscionable and unconstitutional” for New York to “conscript” the religious sisters who care for dying patients “on pain of crushing fines and professional ruin.”

Indeed, the New York law so clearly violates the plaintiffs’ First Amendment right to free speech and the free exercise of religion, we can only wonder if what New York is really doing is to make a court-ordered religious-exemption clause look like a “win” for the pro-life cause, when in reality any normalization of physician-assisted suicide is a disastrous defeat for human dignity.