A small order of Catholic nuns who provide free hospice care to terminal cancer patients filed a lawsuit Tuesday against New York Governor Kathy Hochul, arguing that a state law forcing them to adopt gender-identity policies in their 42-bed facility violates their religious convictions and their constitutional rights, and that noncompliance could cost them fines, their license, or even a year behind bars.
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne run Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York, where they have cared for the dying poor for more than a century. They take no insurance, accept no government funds, and charge their patients nothing. Now Albany says they must assign rooms by gender identity rather than biological sex, grant access to opposite-sex bathrooms, use preferred pronouns, train their sisters and staff in the state's gender-identity framework, and post a public notice declaring compliance.
If they refuse, the penalties are steep: fines starting at $2,000 per violation and rising to $5,000, plus potential criminal penalties of up to $10,000 and one year in prison for willful violations of public health law, as Fox News Digital reported.
The sisters' lawsuit includes a detail that sharpens the conflict considerably. During the four-year reporting period from February 1, 2022, through January 31, 2026, the New York State Department of Health received zero complaints from Rosary Hill Home residents. The lawsuit contrasts that figure with more than 55,000 complaints filed against other nursing homes statewide and an average of 23 citations per facility during the same window.
Zero complaints. Zero citations. And yet the state began pressuring the sisters to overhaul their operations almost immediately after the law took effect.
The law in question, formally titled the "Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and people living with HIV long-term care facility residents' bill of rights", was signed by Hochul on November 30, 2023. A press release from the Catholic Benefits Association said the Department of Health sent the first in a series of "Dear Administrator" letters to Rosary Hill Home on March 18, 2024, listing the state's demands and including a training curriculum requiring the sisters to align patient care and the training of their sisters and employees with the state's gender ideology.
The state sent three warning letters in total, the New York Post reported, ratcheting up pressure on a facility whose entire mission is comforting people in their final days.
Mother Marie Edward, O.P., the general superior of the Hawthorne Dominicans, told Fox News Digital in a statement that the order's work is simple and selfless:
"We are consecrated religious Sisters and have one mission. It is to provide comfort and skilled care to persons dying of cancer who cannot afford nursing care. We do not take insurance or government funds or money from our patients or families. The care is totally free."
She added that the sisters serve without regard to background, but that the state's mandate crosses a line their faith will not permit them to cross.
"We do this without discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or sex. We do it because Jesus taught us that, when the least among us are sick, we should care for them, as if they were Christ himself. New York's gender ideology mandates not only violate our Catholic values, they threaten our existence with fines, injunctions, license revocation, and even jail time. This is why we were forced to go to court to seek protection of our religious exercise and freedom of speech so that we can continue our ministry to the poor."
The lawsuit raises First and Fourteenth Amendment claims, the Washington Times reported, arguing that the mandate conflicts with Catholic teaching and that the state has not granted the sisters a religious exemption. The suit frames the pronoun requirement as more than a question of etiquette. "The implications are so much greater than whether to utter the words 'he' or 'she,'" the lawsuit states. "Indeed, to demand that a Catholic deny another's sex is to require him or her to affirm another religious worldview."
That framing puts the case squarely in the growing national debate over whether government can compel private citizens, and especially religious institutions, to affirm contested ideological claims as a condition of operating. It is the kind of culture-war legal fight that states like Colorado have repeatedly taken to the Supreme Court and lost.
When Fox News Digital reached out to Hochul's office for comment, the governor's office referred the inquiry to the New York State Department of Health. A department spokesperson offered a careful non-answer:
"While the Department does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation, the NYS Department of Health is committed to following state law, which provides nursing home residents certain rights protecting against discrimination including, but not limited to, gender identity or expression."
That statement does not address the sisters' religious-liberty claims, the absence of any complaints from their residents, or the question of whether the state considered a religious exemption before sending enforcement letters to a Catholic hospice.
Sister Stella Mary, O.P., the administrator of Rosary Hill Home, invoked the order's foundress in a press release from the Catholic Benefits Association. Mother Alphonsa Hawthorne charged the sisters to serve those who are "to pass from one life to another" and to "make them as comfortable and happy as if their own people had kept them and put them into the very best bedroom."
"We intend to continue honoring this sacred obligation but need relief from the Court to do so," Sister Stella Mary said.
The sisters say the law would require them to assign rooms based on a resident's stated gender identity rather than biological sex, allow residents access to bathrooms designated for the opposite sex, permit expression, relationships, and identity practices that may conflict with Catholic moral teaching, use a resident's preferred pronouns, train all sisters and staff in the state's gender-identity framework, and post a public notice declaring compliance with the law.
For a 42-bed Catholic hospice staffed by consecrated religious women who have taken vows, each of those requirements implicates the order's beliefs in a direct and personal way. The sisters are not a large corporate chain weighing a compliance cost. They are a small religious community whose daily work, bathing, feeding, praying with, and sitting beside dying patients, is inseparable from the faith that motivates it.
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have operated for more than 120 years, National Review noted, caring for terminally ill patients who have nowhere else to turn. Mother Marie Edward emphasized that point: "We have never had complaints. We cannot implement New York's mandate without violating our Catholic faith."
The case lands at a moment when religious-liberty challenges are stacking up across the country. The Supreme Court has recently shown willingness to protect expressive and religious freedoms against state mandates, a trend that should give Albany pause. The Court unanimously cleared the path for a street preacher's First Amendment lawsuit not long ago, signaling that governments compelling speech or punishing religious exercise face an increasingly skeptical bench.
New York, meanwhile, continues to press culture-war mandates without apparent concern for the collateral damage. Hochul signed this law in late 2023. The Department of Health began sending enforcement letters within months. No religious exemption was offered. No accommodation was discussed, at least none that appears in the public record. The state's posture toward a group of nuns who care for the dying poor, free of charge, with zero complaints on file, has been: comply or face consequences.
That posture is worth examining. New York's nursing-home system logged more than 55,000 complaints over the same period Rosary Hill Home logged none. If the Department of Health wanted to improve the lives of long-term-care residents, it might start with the facilities generating tens of thousands of grievances rather than targeting the one facility with a perfect record.
But that would require prioritizing patient welfare over ideological enforcement. And in Albany, the priorities are plain.
The broader pattern of institutional overreach in New York, from redistricting fights to regulatory mandates, suggests this is less about protecting vulnerable residents than about establishing the state's authority to dictate belief.
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne are not asking for the right to turn anyone away. They say they have served patients "from all walks of life, ideologies, and faiths," treating each one "with dignity and Christian charity." Their lawsuit does not seek to deny care. It seeks the right to provide that care without being forced to affirm a set of beliefs their faith rejects.
The state's law contains no religious exemption. It treats a Catholic hospice the same as a secular corporate nursing chain. It demands that women who have consecrated their lives to a specific religious mission abandon that mission's teachings, or face prison.
Reasonable people can disagree about gender-identity policy. But threatening nuns with jail for declining to post a pronoun compliance notice in a facility where no one has ever complained is not a sign of a government protecting the vulnerable. It is a sign of a government more interested in enforcing orthodoxy than in serving the people it claims to champion.
When the state's idea of justice is prosecuting the people who care for the dying poor, for free, with love, and without a single complaint, the state has lost the plot entirely.
