Illinois: Catholic religious sisters sue to halt assisted suicide

On September 3, Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, two orders of religious sisters and a Catholic pharmacist in Illinois asked a federal district court to keep the state's assisted-suicide law from being applied to them. The two communities are the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and the Chicago province of the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose homes care for the elderly and the dying.

Signed by Governor JB Pritzker in December 2025, the law allows physicians to prescribe lethal doses to terminally ill patients; it is set to take effect on September 12. From that date, according to the complaint, care providers — including the homes run by the sisters — would have to raise “the option” of suicide with their patients of their own accord and let the sick take their lives on their premises. The plaintiffs argue that the First Amendment forbids the state to compel Catholic caregivers to take part in this scheme under threat of fines and penalties.

Cardinal Cupich said: “As Catholics, we oppose efforts that undermine human dignity by pushing our brothers and sisters toward suicide. We pray that the courts will protect our freedom to continue to defend and care for the sick and the dying as our faith requires.” Mother Mary Rose Heery, prioress general of the Carmelites, summed up her sisters' calling by saying that Illinois “cannot ask us to replace that promise with help in ending their lives.” Mother Julie Marie, provincial of the Little Sisters of the Poor, argued that the sick “should be free to choose this kind of care without the state inserting assisted suicide into it.”

When he signed the law, Governor Pritzker spoke of “freedom and choice at the end of life, at the heart of a deeply personal ordeal.” This is not the first such suit in the state: in August, the Bishop of Springfield, Thomas Paprocki, a Lutheran retirement home and a group of physicians had already challenged the text, and the state had agreed to a temporary block limited to those plaintiffs alone.

The fifth commandment makes no exception for the dying

God's law is plain: “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus xx, 13). The Catechism of the Council of Trent, explaining this commandment, teaches that it forbids a man to lay hands on his own life as on his neighbor's, for no one is master of the blood that runs in him. Saint Thomas Aquinas proves it in three steps: to take one's own life is contrary to the charity every man owes himself, contrary to the order of nature, and above all a usurpation, for life and death are in God's hands alone — “I will kill and I will make to live” (Deuteronomy xxxii, 39). Saint Augustine, from the first books of the City of God, allows suicide no excuse, be it pain or dishonor: it falls, he says, under the prohibition “Thou shalt not kill.”

The measure

Against this perennial law, the Illinois statute does not merely tolerate suicide: it means to enlist those who care for the sick. To compel a religious house to offer death as an “option” of care, and to open its walls to it, is to command a direct cooperation in an act the Church has always held to be homicide. But no civil power can order what God forbids. The rule of the Apostles stands: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts v, 29). Where the state confounds liberty with the right to destroy oneself and would press caregivers into its service, it steps beyond its competence, and the Christian soul owes it a refusal.

What the faithful must hold

The care of the aged and the dying is a work of mercy, not the antechamber of a death dealt out. What these sisters defend today before a court, they held long before it: one watches beside the dying, eases his pain, opens the sacraments to him; one never hands him the poison. The Christian upholds this refusal, prays for the sick tempted to despair, and takes care not to hail as progress what the faith has always named a grave sin. The law will pass or be blocked; the commandment does not change.

Sources. Sacred Scripture according to the Vulgate: Exodus xx, 13; Deuteronomy xxxii, 39; Acts of the Apostles v, 29. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 64, a. 5. Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book I.