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.”
