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The European church was Gothic, gordeon, Byzantine, labyrinth, crowded and overpopulated, a thriving metropolis of pantheonic bewilderment. The American Protestant church was clean and pristine. The European of insidious and corrupt complexities.

Put on your Sunday-morning custom-design. I preferred sweaters. We are going to the theater of the eleven o'clock service. The eleven o'clock was for the big-shots. If anybody had money in town they went to the eleven o'clock. The kids were generally shunted to the nine, a different crowd there, maybe people ducking the eleven-dressed to the nines crowd, but more so the coffee klatchers and gossipers in the basement mobbed between services. It was quite a buzz.

Big stone city churches were portrayed in the movies as sanctuaries, especially Catholic Churches. Inside one could not be touched by the long arm of the state outside. They were like foreign embassies. These churches were sovereigns onto themselves, magic countries not to be found other-than within the church edifice. They were nations inside architecture, under the auspices of God's law, with teams of corporal lawyers. Well - its all interpretation isn't it ? The disagreement of lawyers, all the small-print denominations. These were mini-states in the macro-world. They were their-own countriness. They had diplomatic status. They had emissaries in purple robes. They could tell jokes and knew them all and as well-whiskey, fine liquors and wines, in only private gatherings where; if one were to so-suspect, it was told necessary for relations with the Secularites, who tended all the roads, plumbing and commerce. They have a not-by-God-alone theology.

Church sanctuary was sometimes a theme in thirties and forties movies, especially Spencer Tracy, what a name, playing usually the Ambassador of the church of Love and rectitude. Was the asylumer worthy of inviolate-protection ?

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