Abp. of San Francisco to Nancy Pelosi & City Hall: "It's Discrimination...We Follow the Science"

Please pray for California!

On this week’s episode of The Catholic Talk Show, Ryan Scheel, Fr. Rich Pagano, and Ryan DellaCrosse interview Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco about his “Free the Mass” campaign in response to the city’s worship restrictions.

Archbishop Cordileone said can “no longer give City Hall the benefit of the doubt.”

“This is…disdain for the Catholic Church,” he said. “We are being targeted and discriminated against.”

In the interview, the Archbishop also responds to Nancy Pelosi’s comments about ‘following the science with your religious services’ and he explains why he believes City Hall discriminates against Catholics.

“I wanted to focus more on City Hall, to insist with them that we are following the science.

“First of all, they’re saying, ‘follow the science with your religious services.’ Why aren’t they saying that to anyone else? They’re not telling stores, they’re not telling massage parlors, they’re not telling museums. Show us the science that your activity is safe.

“With them they are being reasonable: ‘submit a safety plan, we review it, we approve it, and you can go back into operation according to that safety plan.’

“They only say that to us–‘follow the science.’ So that’s one thing–there you have unequal treatment.

“Secondly, we are following the science. We have the study that was issued a couple of weeks ago by the three specialists in infections diseases who studied over a period of 14 weeks one million Masses that were celebrated around the country following the safety protocols.

“These safety protocols were a model issued by the Thomistic Institute in Washington, D.C. that formed a committee of people with different areas of expertise: health science, theologians, liturgy experts–to come up with a way to celebrate Mass in a way that’s going to protect people’s health.

“We’re all following those. We may make little tweaks here and there. We’re all following those safety protocols.

“One million Masses where those safety protocols were observed, there was not one case of an infection traceable to an indoor worship service. Not one case in one million Masses. How could you want anything more than that to be sure we’re going to be safe?

“I’ve insisted to my priests that when we open up for worship (for a while we have three counties in the archdiocese–for a while, one of the counties was allowed to have indoor services.) I insisted, ‘you can’t have a service unless you will and are able to follow these safety protocols.’

“So we are following the science. I just wish they would require everyone else to give data to show that they follow the science if they require that of us.”