The National Catholic Register portal reports that “Archbishop” Ronald Hicks of New York has called the state’s forthcoming assisted suicide law — set to take effect August 5, 2026 — an “assault on human life,” warning of a “slippery slope” toward a “throwaway mentality.” Disability rights advocates, including Jose Hernandez, a C-5 quadriplegic, joined the chorus of opposition, citing concerns about insurance coercion and the devaluation of the vulnerable. The “archbishop” invoked the death of “Pope” Francis as a model of dignified natural death, and various pro-life organizations emphasized palliative care and hospice alternatives. On the surface, this appears to be a rare instance of a post-conciliar churchman opposing a manifestly evil law. Yet a rigorous examination from the perspective of integral Catholic faith reveals the profound inadequacy, theological confusion, and modernist subtext that pervade this entire discourse — an inadequacy that is itself a fruit of the conciliar revolution.
The Law Itself: A Manifest Crime Against the Natural Law
Let us begin with what must be stated without equivocation: any law permitting a physician to prescribe lethal drugs for the purpose of self-administered killing is intrinsically evil, contrary to the Fifth Commandment, and constitutes a grave offense against the natural law which even the pagan philosophers of antiquity recognized. The Catholic Church has taught infallibly that human life is sacred from conception to natural death, and that no human authority — whether individual, medical, or governmental — may directly and intentionally destroy an innocent human being at any stage of existence. This is not a matter of theological opinion but of the universal and ordinary Magisterium.
Pope Pius XII, in his Address to the International Congress of Anesthesiologists (November 24, 1956), declared: “It is not for the doctor, as a private individual or as a representative of the State, to decide on the life or death of a human being. The doctor’s role is to protect life, not to destroy it.” The 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued under Pope John Paul II, stated unequivocally: “No one can make an attempt on the life of an innocent person without thereby attacking the fundamental good of the human person, which is life itself, and without thereby attacking the very foundation of the social order.”
The New York law — permitting a person diagnosed with a terminal illness of six months or less to request lethal drugs — is therefore not merely imprudent or dangerous. It is formal cooperation with murder, and any Catholic who participates in its implementation, whether as physician, pharmacist, bureaucrat, or even as a “witness” to the written request, cooperates in an objectively grave evil. The death certificate listing the “underlying disease” as cause of death is itself a fraudulent concealment of homicide, a bureaucratic lie designed to sanitize the killing.
The “Archbishop’s” Critique: Sound in Conclusion, Bankrupt in Foundation
“Archbishop” Hicks is correct — to a limited and superficial degree — in identifying the law as dangerous. His warning about the “slippery slope” from choice to expectation, from the terminally ill to the disabled, the elderly, and the impoverished, is empirically well-founded. The history of every jurisdiction that has legalized assisted suicide — the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Oregon — confirms this trajectory with terrifying precision. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, which initially required a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death, has now expanded to include persons whose sole underlying condition is mental illness, with plans to include the “mature minors.” The “archbishop’s” concern is therefore not speculative; it is prophetic in the merely natural sense.
However, the theological and moral framework within which “Archbishop” Hicks operates is fatally compromised. He writes in First Things — a publication that, while occasionally useful, has long served as a platform for the heterodox “Orthodox” establishment and its accommodationist tendencies — that “our lives are sacred gifts from God that we are to protect and cherish.” This is true as far as it goes. But the critical question is: on what authority does he speak, and what is the fullness of the doctrine he is obligated to proclaim?
The answer is devastating. “Archbishop” Hicks operates within the conciliar sect — the post-Vatican II structure that has systematically undermined, relativized, and in many cases effectively denied the very doctrines he here invokes. The same conciliar apparatus that Hicks acknowledges as his ecclesial home has:
– Promoted the “theology of the body” of John Paul II, which, despite surface orthodoxy, was embedded within a framework of personalist phenomenology incompatible with the Thomistic metaphysics of the pre-conciliar Church;
– Permitted and in many cases encouraged the “Catholic” healthcare systems to cooperate with contraception mandates, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs;
– Failed to excommunicate or even formally admonish pro-abortion “Catholic” politicians, in direct violation of the Church’s own canonical tradition;
– Watched passively as the “Catholic” hospital systems in New York — including those under Hicks’s own nominal jurisdiction — participated in the very culture of death he now decries.
The “archbishop” cannot credibly oppose one fruit of apostasy while remaining institutionally embedded in the tree that bears it. His protest is structurally analogous to a man who protests the fire in one room while living in a house whose foundation has been deliberately undermined by arsonists — arsonists whom he refuses to name, confront, or separate from.
The Invocation of “Pope” Francis: A Scandalous Appeal
Perhaps the most revealing — and the most scandalous — element of the “archbishop’s” argument is his invocation of the death of “Pope” Francis as a model of dignified natural death. He writes: “We saw the beauty of a natural death exemplified just over a year ago when Pope Francis, clearly weakened by illness and age, traveled through St. Peter’s Square in the popemobile on Easter Sunday, demonstrating the dignity of life even while suffering the afflictions and ailments that would claim his life the very next day.”
This passage is a masterclass in modernist rhetoric. Let us dissect it:
First, the appeal to “Pope” Francis as a moral exemplar is, from the perspective of integral Catholic faith, an appeal to a manifest heretic and usurper. The man who occupied the Vatican from 2013 to 2025 was, by his own public statements and actions, a promoter of religious indifferentism, a signatory of the Abu Dhabi Declaration which stated that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions” are “willed by God in His wisdom,” a man who systematically undermined Catholic moral teaching on marriage, sexuality, and the existence of Hell. To invoke such a figure as a witness to the dignity of human life is to legitimize the very system that has produced the culture of death.
Second, the “archbishop’s” description of Francis’s death as “beautiful” and “dignified” is a naturalistic reduction of the supernatural reality of Christian death. The Catholic understanding of death is not that it is “beautiful” in the aesthetic sense — it is the wages of sin (Romans 6:23), the consequence of the Fall, the moment of particular judgment, and the gateway to eternal salvation or damnation. The “beauty” of a Christian death lies not in the physical circumstances — a popemobile, a weakened body — but in the state of grace, the reception of the last sacraments, and the hope of resurrection. The “archbishop” reduces this supernatural reality to a naturalistic tableau — a scene of serene decline — that would be equally compatible with Stoic philosophy or secular humanism.
Third, and most damningly, the “archbishop” makes no mention whatsoever of the sacramental dimension of death. There is no mention of the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, no mention of Viaticum, no mention of the necessity of confession and absolution before death, no mention of the state of grace as the prerequisite for salvation. The entire discourse is conducted on the level of natural ethics — “dignity,” “compassion,” “vigilance” — without any reference to the supernatural order that is the raison d’être of the Church’s existence. This is the hallmark of Modernism: the reduction of the supernatural to the natural, of theology to ethics, of the Church to a humanitarian organization.
The Disability Advocate: Natural Courage, Supernatural Silence
Jose Hernandez, the C-5 quadriplegic who spoke against the law, deserves genuine admiration for his personal courage and his willingness to defend the dignity of the disabled. His testimony — that society treats the disabled as a “burden,” that insurance companies will be incentivized to approve the cheaper alternative of death, that his own mother outlived her terminal diagnosis by thirteen years — is powerful and true.
Yet the article presents Hernandez’s witness entirely within a naturalistic framework. He urges people to consider “alternatives such as hospice and palliative care, or even induced comas, to pass with ‘peace’ into the next life.” The phrase “pass with ‘peace’ into the next life” is revealing in its vagueness. What is the “next life”? Is it the Christian hope of resurrection and eternal beatitude? Or is it a generic spiritualism compatible with any religion or none? The article does not say, and this silence is itself symptomatic.
The Catholic truth is that the disabled — indeed, all human beings — possess infinite dignity because they are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27), redeemed by the Precious Blood of Christ (1 Peter 1:18-19), and called to eternal beatific vision. This dignity is not contingent on physical capacity, economic productivity, or social utility. It is ontological, rooted in the very nature of the human person as a rational creature with an immortal soul. The defense of the disabled must be grounded in this theological truth — not merely in the language of “rights,” “dignity,” and “compassion,” which, while not false, are insufficient and easily co-opted by the very forces they oppose.
The “Slippery Slope” Without the Theological Foundation
“Archbishop” Hicks warns of the “slippery slope” — that what begins as a “personal choice” for the terminally ill will evolve into an “expectation” for the disabled, the elderly, and the poor. This is empirically correct, as the evidence from every jurisdiction that has legalized assisted suicide demonstrates. But the “archbishop” fails to identify the root cause of this slope.
The root cause is not merely “secularism” or “the throwaway culture” — phrases that have become clichés in post-conciliar discourse. The root cause is the rejection of the supernatural order — the denial that human life has a transcendent purpose, that suffering has redemptive value when united to the Cross of Christ, that death is not the end but the passage to eternity, and that the moral law is not a human convention but the eternal law of God inscribed in the nature of creation.
Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism that removes Christ and His law from the governance of nations. He wrote: “When God and Jesus Christ — as we lamented — were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed.” The legalization of assisted suicide is a direct consequence of the rejection of Christ’s kingship over the civil order. No amount of “vigilance,” “compassion,” or “advance care planning” can substitute for the restoration of this fundamental truth.
The Silence on the Supernatural: The Gravest Omission
The most damning critique of this entire discourse — the “archbishop’s” article, the disability advocate’s testimony, the pro-life organizations’ statements — is what it omits. There is no mention of:
– The necessity of the state of grace for salvation;
– The reality of sin — both the sin of the individual who takes his own life and the sin of the society that facilitates it;
– The redemptive value of suffering when united to the Passion of Christ;
– The existence of Hell and the reality of eternal damnation;
– The authority of the Church as the sole arbiter of moral truth;
– The duty of Catholic civil rulers to prohibit and punish acts contrary to the natural law;
– The intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints for those facing terminal illness;
– The efficacy of prayer, the sacraments, and the Church’s liturgical tradition — particularly the Requiem Mass and the prayers for the dying — in preparing the soul for death.
This silence is not accidental. It is the defining characteristic of post-conciliar “Catholic” discourse: the reduction of the faith to natural ethics, the substitution of humanitarianism for supernatural charity, the replacement of the Church’s salvific mission with social advocacy. The “archbishop” opposes assisted suicide not because it is a mortal sin against the Fifth Commandment, but because it is an “assault on human life” — a phrase that, in its abstraction, could be endorsed by any secular humanist.
The True Catholic Response
The true Catholic response to the legalization of assisted suicide must be grounded in the fullness of Catholic doctrine, not in the truncated moralism of post-conciliar Modernism. It must include:
1. The clear and unequivocal declaration that assisted suicide is a grave sin against the Fifth Commandment, that any participation in it — whether as physician, pharmacist, bureaucrat, witness, or family member — is formal cooperation with murder, and that those who die by assisted suicide without repentance imperil their eternal salvation.
2. The proclamation of the redemptive value of suffering. Pope St. John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris (1984), taught that suffering, when united to the Cross of Christ, has redemptive value for the individual and for the whole Church. This does not mean that suffering is to be sought for its own sake, but that it is to be accepted with faith and love as a participation in the Passion of Our Lord. The terminally ill are not “burdens” to be eliminated; they are members of the Mystical Body of Christ whose suffering, when offered in union with His, has incalculable supernatural value.
3. The insistence on the sacramental preparation for death. The Church has always taught that the dying must be prepared through the Sacraments of Penance, Anointing of the Sick, and Viaticum (Holy Communion for the dying). The “Last Rites” — so called because they are the final sacramental graces administered to the departing soul — are not optional devotions but necessities for salvation. Any Catholic who fails to ensure that a dying person receives these sacraments is guilty of grave negligence.
4. The affirmation of the Church’s authority over the moral order. The Church does not merely “oppose” assisted suicide as one opinion among others. She condemns it as contrary to the divine and natural law, and she demands that Catholic civil rulers prohibit and punish it. The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX (1864) condemned the proposition that “the civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality and spiritual government” (Proposition 44) and affirmed the Church’s exclusive competence in matters of faith and morals. The legalization of assisted suicide is a usurpation of the Church’s authority by the secular state, and it must be resisted not merely with “vigilance” but with the full weight of the Church’s doctrinal and canonical authority.
5. The recognition that the only true solution to the “culture of death” is the restoration of the Social Kingship of Christ. As Pope Pius XI taught in Quas Primas, peace and order in society are impossible when Christ and His law are excluded from the governance of nations. The legalization of assisted suicide is a symptom of the disease of secularism, and no amount of palliative care advocacy or “advance care planning” can cure the disease while leaving the cause intact. The only true remedy is the recognition of Christ the King over the civil order — a recognition that demands the prohibition of all acts contrary to the natural law, including abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.
Conclusion: The Poverty of Post-Conciliar “Pro-Life” Advocacy
The opposition of “Archbishop” Hicks and the various advocates cited in this article to the New York assisted suicide law is, in its limited natural dimension, commendable. But it is theologically impoverished, supernaturally barren, and structurally compromised by its embeddedness in the conciliar sect. It opposes the fruit while tolerating the tree. It invokes “dignity” without defining it theologically. It warns of the “slippery slope” without identifying the theological root of the slope. It invokes “Pope” Francis — a manifest heretic — as a moral exemplar. It reduces the Church’s mission to humanitarian advocacy.
The Catholic faithful — those who profess the integral faith of the Church before the conciliar revolution — must reject this truncated moralism and proclaim the fullness of the truth: that human life is sacred because it is created by God, redeemed by Christ, and destined for eternal beatitude; that suffering has redemptive value when united to the Cross; that the dying must be prepared through the sacraments; that the Church has exclusive authority over the moral order; and that the only true solution to the culture of death is the restoration of the Social Kingship of Christ the King.
“When God and Jesus Christ are removed from laws and states, the foundations of authority are destroyed” (Pius XI, Quas Primas). The legalization of assisted suicide in New York is a confirmation of this truth. The response of the “archbishop” and his allies is a demonstration of the Church’s inability to resist the very evil she has been complicit in creating. Only a return to integral Catholic faith — the faith of the Church before 1958, the faith of the Fathers, the faith of the Council of Trent, the faith of St. Pius X’s Pascendi and Lamentabili — can provide the foundation for a truly Catholic resistance to the culture of death.
Source:
New York Archbishop Hicks Calls Assisted Suicide an ‘Assault’ On Human Life (ncregister.com)
Date: 10.06.2026