ATLANTA—Archbishop Gregory J. Hartmayer and Atlanta’s auxiliary bishops have issued a statement of support for the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne amid a legal action against the State of New York. The Hawthorne Dominicans operate a 42-bed palliative care program for the dying poor in Hawthorne, New York.

The Department of Justice has moved to become a co-plaintiff in the suit. A 2024 New York law, known as the Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights for LGBTQ+ New Yorkers and People Living with HIV, requires long-term care facilities to use preferred pronouns and assign rooms based on gender identity.

The sisters’ facility, Rosary Hill, serves cancer patients. The sisters also operate Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta.

The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York  A hearing date has not been set, and the state is expected to ask the court to dismiss the suit. In a June 18 statement, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dillon said that states should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of gender ideology.

The Georgia bishops statement, provided on July 1, follows:

“We, the bishops of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, write with gratitude and solidarity to express our wholehearted support for the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who are currently engaged in legal proceedings in the State of New York to defend their right to conduct their sacred apostolate in fidelity to the Catholic faith. We do so not as a matter of political partisanship, but as shepherds of the Church bearing witness to the enduring truth of the sacred dignity of every human person as created by God.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne-formally the Congregation of Saint Rose of Lima-were founded on December 8, 1900, by the Venerable Servant of God Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, a daughter of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and a convert to the Catholic faith. Moved by compassion for the poorest of the dying, Mother Mary Alphonsa, OP, as she came to be known, gave her life to the care of those suffering from incurable cancer who had no means to pay for their treatment. In so doing, she embodied the Dominican charism in its most tender expression: to contemplate the truth of the Gospel and to share its fruits with those in greatest need. For more than 125 years, the Sisters have continued her work without accepting payment from any patient, relying entirely upon the generosity of benefactors and the providence of God.

The Sisters have been a beloved presence in the Archdiocese of Atlanta since 1939, when they came to our city and founded Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home, caring for the dying poor with incomparable tenderness and charity. For nearly nine decades, they have served women and men of all backgrounds and beliefs, seeing in each patient the face of Christ. The home stands today as a witness to what the Church teaches and what the culture often forgets: that every human life, however diminished by illness or poverty, is of infinite worth.

It is in this context that we must speak concretely about the current litigation. The State of New York has threatened the Sisters with fines, the loss of their nursing home license, and even imprisonment unless they comply with a law requiring them to assign patient rooms, use pronouns, and conduct intimate personal care according to gender identity rather than biological sex. The State of New York has now demanded that they abandon the Church’s teaching that biological sex is God-given and immutable-a teaching rooted not in animus toward any person, but in a profound reverence for the human body as created by God. We are grateful that the Department of Justice of the United States has recognized the gravity of this threat to religious freedom and has joined the Sisters in their legal action.

This is, at its heart, a question of religious liberty. A government that compels religious women to choose between their faith and their license to serve the dying has transgressed the fundamental rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and has placed an intolerable burden upon the Church’s ministry to the most vulnerable. We stand with our Sisters in the conviction that the freedom to live and to serve in accordance with the teaching of the Church is not a privilege to be granted by the State, but a right that belongs to every person and every religious community.

We ask the faithful of our province to keep the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne in their prayers, to give thanks for their extraordinary witness to the Gospel of Life, and to stand in solidarity with them as they continue-as they have for well over a century-to see the face of Christ in the dying poor and to honor the sacred dignity of every human person.”

Archbishop Gregory J. Hartmayer, OFM Conv.

Bishop Joel M. Konzen, SM; Bishop Bernard E. Shlesinger III;  Bishop John Nhan Tran, auxiliary bishops