Seventy-one members of the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church near Rancho Cordova, including the church pastor, have been afflicted with the virus, county officials say, making this one of the larger outbreak clusters in the country. One parishioner has died, officials said, and the pastor is sick.
Sacramento health officials say they have made several attempts via phone and in person this week to talk to church leaders, but have been rebuffed. The cases involve residents of Yolo and Placer counties as well.
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Beilenson and county officials say they are granting The Sacramento Bee’s request to reveal the name of the church to help warn other community members who associate with church congregants, in hopes that those people will stay away. Officials said they hope that public disclosure will put pressure on church members to stop their gatherings.
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Florin Ciuriuc, a Slavic community leader, said the church is the largest Slavic congregation in the United States, with 3,500 members and a total attendance at various services of up to 10,000 when children and friends are counted.
“They have people traveling from all kinds of states, they have visitors from everywhere,” he said.
He added that large churches all stopped having services, but that he has been hearing that some smaller operations may have quietly continued in small offices or homes.
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Ruslan Gurzhiy, a Sacramento journalist who runs a news site called Slavic Sacramento, in a Thursday interview with The Bee said he spent seven years as a volunteer at Bethany Slavic.
“These people are ignorant,” Gurzhiy said of Bethany Slavic ministry leaders. “They don’t care about government ... They do their stuff, and they don’t want people to know what they do.”
As for parishioners, Sacramento’s Slavic community is “really religious” but many are poorly educated, do not speak English and depend on their church for information, Gurzhiy said.
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A church in Lodi is in a similar standoff with authorities, sending the city a “cease and desist” letter after police officers entered the church during a service Wednesday night.
A lawyer for Cross Culture Christian Center said the First Amendment protects the church’s right to hold services.
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The virus cases at the [Sacramento] church represent 22 percent of known coronavirus cases in [Sacramento] county. The county has reported 341 cases and nine deaths as of Wednesday.
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