Court Says Chicago Archdiocese and Nuns Won’t Have to Submit to Illinois Suicide Law| National Catholic Register
The Catholic objectors will be temporarily shielded from the law while a federal lawsuit plays out against the state policy.
The Archdiocese of Chicago and a group of Catholic religious sisters won a temporary reprieve against Illinois’s assisted suicide law this week, with a federal judge ordering the state not to enforce the law against the Catholic objectors while a federal lawsuit continues.
U.S. District Judge Franklin Valderrama’s Sept. 11 order said the state would be blocked from enforcing the suicide law against the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and the Little Sisters of the Poor who had brought the lawsuit.
Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich is also a plaintiff in the suit. The order applies only to the sisters and the archdiocese, the judge said; the state is free to enforce the suicide law elsewhere.
The Catholic objectors brought the lawsuit on Sept. 3, arguing that the suicide law infringes on religious liberty by requiring Catholics to participate in helping patients end their own lives. Lawyers filed the lawsuit with the religious liberty law firm Becket.
On Sept. 11, Cardinal Cupich said in a statement that the law should be struck down “permanently.”
“To be clear, the Church’s objection to this statute is not an attempt to impose Catholic teaching on non-Catholics,” the archbishop said. Rather, “it is an effort to stop the State from compelling Catholic health care providers to violate their conscience.”
Carmelite Mother Mary Rose Heery, prioress general of the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, said the temporary order “brings real peace of mind to our Sisters, our residents, and their families.”
“It allows us to continue our vocation of showing Christ’s unbounded love to those who need it most—a love that endures in every circumstance and through every hardship,” she said.
Illinois Battleground
Illinois has become a battleground in recent weeks over its suicide law, which Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker signed in December 2025. The measure allows residents with a terminal illness to receive lethal prescriptions from doctors to take their own lives before they die naturally.
In August, Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki, a Lutheran care home, and four Illinois-based doctors filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing, similarly to the Chicago lawsuit, that the state suicide law infringes on their religious freedom and their ability to care for their patients.
Later in the month, the state agreed to not enforce the law against the plaintiffs while the suit plays out. In the meantime, multiple additional Catholic objectors have joined the Springfield Diocese’s lawsuit against the suicide policy.
The Thomas More Society announced on Sept. 11 that five religious health care associations had joined Bishop Paprocki’s suit, including the Illinois Catholic Health Association and the National Association of Catholic Nurses. A doctor and a nurse also joined the suit.
The Thomas More Society said the plaintiffs “represent 95% of Catholic health institutions in Illinois and more than 13,000 health care professionals nationwide.”
Peter Breen, the head of litigation at the legal group, said attorneys were seeking to extend the protection secured by the initial plaintiffs to the “thousands of Catholic and Christian health care professionals” represented in the new filing.
“The First Amendment protects the rights of Catholic and Christian doctors, hospitals, and health care ministries to reject assisted suicide and heal and care for the ill and infirm in accord with their consciences,” Breen said.
He argued that the suicide law “flagrantly violates those rights by forcing dedicated healthcare professionals to promote deadly drugs to their patients.”
