Across the world, 2020 and 2021 has been a time where anti Catholic forces have used the excuse of lockdown to keep churches closed, even without evidence of outbreaks in churches.
In Scotland this week, the courts said that the state had no right to close churches.
Now, in Chile too, the Supreme Court has made the same decision.
On the run up to Easter, the court referred to the ban as an ‘illegal and arbitrary act of extending the ban on public events, applicable to quarantined communes and, on weekends and holidays in communes in transition, to masses and other religious groups’.
They said that the law by Minister Enrique Paris had violated ‘the right to the free exercise of worship’.
This was said in the context of a similar situation to Ireland, wherein the ban goes against the very essence of civil society and constitutionality: ‘this does not authorize them to suspend or affect them in essence, as in fact happens by preventing Catholics from attending Mass (...), which violates their right to the free exercise of worship, guaranteed in the Constitution".
