New York ‘Religious Liberty’ Win: Conciliar Sect Accommodates Assisted Suicide Regime
The National Catholic Register reports that four communities of conciliar “sisters” in New York secured a temporary federal court order on July 30, 2026, barring the state from compelling their participation in the newly legalized assisted suicide regime scheduled to take effect August 5. The lawsuit, spearheaded by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and joined by “Bishop” John Barres of Rockville Centre, resulted in a consent order from U.S. District Judge Anne Nardacci. The “superior generals” of the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne celebrated the decision as allowing them to continue “loving service to Christ’s poor.” “Bishop” Barres called it an “important first step toward protecting religious freedom.” This legal maneuver exposes the conciliar sect’s total capitulation to the secularist order, substituting the Social Kingship of Christ with the Masonic chimera of “religious liberty,” thereby legitimizing the very regime of death they claim to oppose.
The Juridical Farce: Seeking Exemptions from the Law of God in Masonic Courts
The cited article reveals the quintessential strategy of the conciliar sect: litigation before the secular magistrate to carve out a “safe space” for its institutions within a legal order that has formally apostatized from God. The “sisters” and their “bishop” do not challenge the intrinsic injustice of the law—which legalizes the direct killing of the innocent—but merely seek a privilegium for themselves. This is the practical application of the heresy of Dignitatis Humanae: the “right to religious freedom” becomes a plea for tolerance from the State, an admission that the State is the supreme arbiter of what is permitted.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, thundered against this very inversion: “When God and Jesus Christ… 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.” By petitioning a federal judge for a “consent order,” the conciliar plaintiffs implicitly recognize the legitimacy of a civil power that “derives authority from men,” not God. They accept the jurisdiction of the City of Man over the City of God.
The Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX, 1864) explicitly condemns the proposition: “The Church is not a true and perfect society, entirely free… but it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights of the Church, and the limits within which she may exercise those rights” (Error 19) and “The ecclesiastical power ought not to exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government” (Error 20). The lawsuit is a textbook enactment of these condemned errors. The “sisters” ask Caesar for permission to obey God, and Caesar, in his “magnanimity,” grants a temporary stay. This is not victory; it is servitus.
The Linguistic Camouflage: “Loving Service” Without the Cross
The rhetoric deployed by the conciliar agents is deliberately stripped of the supernatural. Mother Marie Edward, OP, speaks of “loving service to Christ’s poor.” Mother Mary Rose Heery, OCarm, speaks of “honoring that trust” and remaining “beside every resident until the very end.” Nowhere is there mention of the Sacraments, the state of grace, the salvation of souls, the Last Rites, or the horror of euthanasia as a sin crying to heaven for vengeance.
This is the language of horizontalist philanthropy, not Catholic charity. Caritas is theological; it orders the neighbor to God. The conciliar “charity” orders the neighbor to comfort. The article notes the “sisters” provide care “according to the Gospel,” yet the Gospel commands: “Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned” (Mk 16:15-16). The “Gospel” of the conciliar sect is a gospel of accompaniment unto the grave, without the Viaticum that opens the gates of eternity.
“Bishop” Barres declares: “New York cannot force the Church to answer suffering with suicide.” A true successor of the Apostles would not negotiate with the State about “force”; he would declare, with Pope Celestine I regarding Nestorius, that the civil ruler “could not remove anyone by sentence who himself had already shown that he must be removed” (Defense of Sedevacantism file). A law permitting murder is lex injusta, non est lex. The duty of the Church is not to sue for an exemption, but to denounce the law as null and void ab initio, binding no conscience, and to excommunicate the legislators who enacted it.
The Theological Bankruptcy: “Religious Liberty” as the New Idol
The Becket Fund, the legal engine of this “victory,” is an institution dedicated to the defense of “religious liberty”—the very error condemned by Gregory XVI (Mirari Vos), Pius IX (Quanta Cura, Syllabus), Leo XIII (Libertas), and Pius XI (Quas Primas). Pius XI writes: “The state must leave the same freedom to the members of Orders… who are indeed the most valiant helpers of the Pastors of the Church and contribute most to the expansion and establishment of Christ’s Kingdom.” But this “freedom” is not the liberal “freedom of conscience”; it is the libertas Ecclesiae, the immunity of the Church from civil interference in her divine mission.
The consent order is a concordata with the culture of death. It says: “We will not impede your killing of the sick elsewhere, only spare our institutions.” This is the silentium pastorum condemned by St. Leo the Great: “The care of the universal Church should converge towards Peter’s one seat, and nowhere should a priest be allowed to claim ignorance of the faith.” Here, the “priests” and “religious” claim a legal right to abstain from killing, while the law stands. They have accepted the framework of the anti-Christian state.
The Symptomatic Rot: The Conciliar “Bishop” as Functionary of the Neo-Church
John Barres, the “Bishop” of Rockville Centre, is presented as a co-plaintiff and spokesman. As a “bishop” of the conciliar sect, he is a manifest heretic by his public adherence to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), and collegiality (Lumen Gentium). According to the theology of St. Robert Bellarmine (De Romano Pontifice) and the Bull Cum ex Apostolatus Officio of Paul IV, a manifest heretic “by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head… just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church” (Defense of Sedevacantism file). The same principle applies to the episcopate: one who is not a member cannot be a head.
Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code states: “Every office becomes vacant by the mere fact and without any declaration… if the cleric: 4. Publicly defects from the Catholic faith.” Fr. McDevitt and Ayrinhac confirm that “joining… a non-Catholic sect is not required to establish the publicity which the canon demands”; formal heresy suffices. Barres, by his public profession of conciliar errors, has ipso facto vacated any office he may have held. His participation in this lawsuit is the act of a private individual, a layman usurping ecclesiastical jurisdiction, leading “religious” who are canonically in the same condition.
The “sisters” belong to institutes erected under the 1983 Code, itself a product of the conciliar revolution, lacking the canonical rigor of the 1917 Code and the theological integrity of pre-1958 religious life. Their “vows” are often dubious in validity given the defective intention regarding the nature of the Church and the papacy. Their “victory” is a victory for the structures occupying the Vatican, demonstrating that the neo-church is a fully integrated subsystem of the Masonic world order, managing its “faith-based” contractors.
The Canadian Precedent: The Logic of the Law Unchecked
The article notes: “Canada has had nationally legalized assisted suicide for about a decade, during which about 100,000 people have taken their lives under the program.” This is the fruit of the same “religious liberty” jurisprudence. When the Church abandons her duty to teach nations that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) and that Christ’s Kingdom demands “all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments” (Quas Primas), the State becomes the totalitarian arbiter of life and death.
The conciliar “bishops” of New York in December 2025 called assisted suicide a “grave moral evil.” But they did not declare the legislators excommunicated, nor the law null, nor organize public reparation. They issued a press release. This is the laicism Pius XI condemned: “the Christian religion began to be equated with other false religions and shamelessly placed in the same category; then it was subordinated to secular power.” The “consent order” is the final subordination: the Church becomes a petitioner for a zoning variance in the Kingdom of Satan.
Conclusion: No Peace with the Enemies of the Cross
The only Catholic response to a law legalizing murder is the response of the Martyrs: Non possumus. We do not sue; we witness. We do not seek “consent orders”; we pronounce anathema sit. The “victory” celebrated by the National Catholic Register is a defeat for the Kingship of Christ. It confirms that the conciliar sect is not the Church of Christ, but a paramasonic structure managing the retreat of the faithful into the catacombs of “exemptions.”
The true Church, the Ecclesia militans, endures in the bishops and priests who retain the unbroken Tradition, valid Orders, and the courage to say to the State: “You have no authority over the souls of the sick; your law is void; repent or perish.” The “sisters” of Hawthorne and the “bishop” of Rockville Centre have chosen the broad way that leads to destruction, paved with legal briefs and the coin of “religious liberty.” Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
Source:
New York Says Catholic Sisters Will Not Be Required to Participate in Assisted Suicide (ncregister.com)
Date: 31.07.2026