MANCHESTER, Conn. — A Jewish veteran and a civil liberties group have sued the U.S. Postal Service, challenging a church-run post office that distributes Christian material.

The Full Gospel Interdenominational Church operates the downtown Manchester post office, where customers can buy stamps, ship their packages, pick up religious brochures and donate money to Christian ministries.

The lawsuit, filed Oct. 3 in U.S. District Court in Hartford by Bertram Cooper, 77, and the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, said the relationship violates the Constitution's First Amendment, which calls for the separation of church and state.

"It upset me," said Cooper, a Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War. "I'm walking into a place that's doing government business — selling stamps, mailing parcels and so forth — and they're doing this religious bit."

A television in the post office shows religious programming, according to the complaint. The television was off the afternoon of Oct. 3. Photos of the church's mission work in Africa line the walls.

"When you go in to buy your stamps, everything around is proselytizing to you about religion or faith that you might not be interested in," said Teresa Younger, executive director of CCLU.

The church is under contract to run the post office, and postal officials said the agency oversees about 5,000 such post offices nationwide.

The agency will not consider giving contracts to businesses that sell pornography or alcohol, said Carl Walton, a spokesman for the Postal Service in Connecticut.

"Other than that, we can give consideration to pretty much any business, within reason," he said.

Walton would not comment on the lawsuit. He said the agency's legal department had not received the complaint as of Oct. 3.

The Manchester-based church runs the post office under the name Sincerely Yours Inc., according to posted material and state filings. Church officials, who are not being sued, did not return phone messages left at the church offices and their homes for this report.

The church opened the downtown post office last year, after another contract office closed. The main post office in Manchester is several miles away.

Rep. John B. Larson, D-Conn., worked with town officials to keep a downtown post office. His spokesman, Michael Kirk, said Larson was not taking a stance on whether the church should run the post office.

However the court rules, the post office should remain open downtown, Kirk said.