ANDREA PICCIOTTI-BAYER: The Nuns Fighting New York To Serve Dying Cancer Patients

A small group of Catholic nuns is taking on one of the most powerful governors in the country. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne are in a striking David-and-Goliath clash with Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and the full weight of New York state. What’s at stake is not just religious liberty, but also whether the kind of quiet charity the Sisters exercise is still welcome in American public life.

Earlier this month, the Sisters filed suit against Hochul in U.S. District Court, challenging a 2024 New York law that requires long-term care facilities to use a patient’s preferred pronouns and to assign rooms and regulate restroom access according to gender identity rather than biological sex. The Sisters can’t comply without violating their Catholic faith. They formally asked the state for a religious exemption in March, but the state did not respond. Penalties for defiance include fines, license revocation, and jail time.

What makes this hard to dismiss as a culture war skirmish is what the Sisters actually do, and for whom. To get into Rosary Hill Home, their 42-bed facility in Westchester County, you need two things: a terminal cancer diagnosis and your word that there is no one else to care for you. No insurance. No government reimbursement. No payment of any kind. In 125 years of operation, the state of New York has recorded exactly zero complaints against them. The law they are now fighting passed the State Assembly 144-2 and the Senate 55-7, with no public hearing. Religious liberty never came up in debate.

The congregation was founded by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of “The Scarlet Letter.” She converted to Catholicism, took a nursing course, and in 1896 rented a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side to care for cancer patients who had nowhere else to go. Her successors are still at it on the same terms. And they are younger than you might expect: the congregation’s members range in age from 19 to 40. These are not elderly sisters outlasting a fading mission. They are women who chose a life of poverty, obedience, and night watches at the bedsides of the dying and are now in federal court to keep doing it.