US: Lessons of 11 months of sanctuary sit-ins: the altar boys' room makes an excellent office; a confessional booth can be turned into a spacious linen closet; it is not comfortable to sleep on a pew.
And now, an especially surprising lesson: leaders of the archdiocese of Boston - which once dominated the moral and political life of this heavily Catholic city - will reverse their decisions, if you are willing to sit still long enough to make them.
Since last spring, three churches marked for closure and occupied by protesting parishioners have won reprieves. Another was spared by the archdiocesan leadership after its members threatened to hire a married priest.
All showed a kind of defiance that would have been unheard of here a decade ago, before the sex-abuse scandal rocked the church. Now, in the midst of a growing rebellion among lay Catholics, many say they are determined to end the days when the church could expect them to "pay, pray and obey".
"We've learned to say 'No' to bishops here in Boston," said Jim Post, a Boston University business-school professor and president of Voice of the Faithful, a group of lay people who united because of their anger at bishops who attempted to cover up allegations of sexual abuse against priests.
Last week, Massachusetts legislators considered a bill that would force the church to provide more financial information to the state.
"The crisis of the church in Boston is not about sex abuse anymore," said James O'Toole, a history professor at Boston College who has written about the history of the Boston church. "It's about a collapse of institutional authority."
That has been vividly seen in the response to scheduled parish closings.
In December 2003, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, citing demographics, not financial constraints from the $85 million settlement with abuse victims, decreed that 83 of the archdiocese's 357 parishes were to be shuttered.
It was not the best timing. Father J. Bryan Hehir, Dr O'Malley's cabinet secretary for social services, said the church had eroded trust among Catholics during the sex abuse scandal - and then asked them to trust that it was doing the right thing by closing churches.
"Closing a military base is a piece of cake compared to closing a parish," Father Hehir said. "Nobody gets buried in a military base."
Dr O'Malley had quickly won praise from victims' advocates for his responsiveness when he replaced the imperious Cardinal Bernard F. Law. Still, when Dr O'Malley announced the parish closings, there was a new willingness from people in the pews to push back.
The sit-ins, called "vigils" here, began in late August, when a few parishioners at St Albert the Great, in the suburb of Weymouth, said at the end of evening Mass that they were staying.
Soon after that, in the East Boston neighbourhood, Gina Scalcione and a friend were making their last visit to Our Lady of Mount Carmel,when Ms Scalcione (64) made a snap decision.
"You're staying. I'm staying," she told her friend. "But it's not just for a night."
In all, there were vigils in nine churches. As they went on for weeks and then months, the occupiers dealt with mundane problems such as plumbing and boilers, and handled the touchier religious issues that came with running both a protest and a parish.
The problem of supplying consecrated communion wafers was solved by Peter Borre, leader of an umbrella group representing the occupied parishes. He finds sympathetic priests to consecrate the wafers secretly, then delivers the wafers to occupied churches.
Then, one church, Star of the Sea in Squantum, Massachusetts, threatened to use a referral service at www.rentapriest.com to hire a married priest, and soon afterwards the archdiocese reversed plans to close the church.
This spring, the archbishop said he would reverse his decision to close St Albert the Great, home to the original sit-in.
In recent weeks, two other occupied churches have received reprieves, though on the condition they function as "chapels", with fewer official activities. But one of the spared churches - St Anselm in Sudbury, Massachusetts - is still being occupied. The leaders of the sit-in say they want more assurances.
"Do we trust these people?" Bill Bannon, a St Anselm's parishioner, said in the church's darkened sanctuary one day last week. "How can you?" - (LA Times-Washington Post service)