Court says Chicago Archdiocese, Catholic sisters won’t have to submit to state suicide law

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. The lawsuit was filed by lawyers with the religious liberty law firm Becket.

On Sept. 11 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…