(CNSNews.com) - Under the COVID-19 rules it is currently enforcing, the City of San Francisco is allowing shopping malls to admit up to 25 percent of their normal capacity and indoor retailers to admit up to 50 percent of their normal capacity as long as people can remain six-feet apart.
But San Francisco is allowing only one person at a time into churches and other places of worship—including the city’s Roman Catholic cathedral, which has a normal capacity of 3,000.
“They allow only one person at a time in a cathedral that has a capacity for about 3,000 to 3,500--if you include the standing room,” Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone told CNSNews.com in an interview.
CNSNews.com asked the archbishop: “Do you think that the city government of San Francisco is specifically targeting religious practice and the Catholic Church?”
“Very clearly they are targeting the Catholic Church,” he said.
“They are clearly targeting us. They are clearly targeting us,” he later emphasized.
CNSNews.com also asked the archbishop: “Are there actually people in the government of the city of San Francisco who want to target the Catholic Church for discrimination?”
“All I can do is draw an inference that there is because we are clearly being targeted,” he said. “We are being discriminated against. So that has to be intentional. Somebody inside there must want to do this because it is very intentional.”
Archbishop Cordileone said that the attack that the City of San Francisco has launched on the freedom of worship is the “most severe” he has seen yet on the First Amendment-protected right to the free exercise of religion.
“I never expected that the most basic religious freedom, the right to worship — protected so robustly in our Constitution’s First Amendment — would be unjustly repressed by an American government,” he wrote in an op-ed published Sept. 16 in the Washington Post. “But that is exactly what is happening in San Francisco. For months now, the city has limited worship services to just 12 people outdoors. Worship inside our own churches is banned.”
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