Worship by the sweat of your brow.

Do Catholic churches have to be saunas? Their lack of creature comforts has one churchgoer pretty steamed up.

Some early council of bishops must have decreed that Catholic churches have to be the most uncomfortable places in town. Is there anywhere you spend time--at a three-hour movie, in a soccer stadium, strapped inside a pilotless ValueJet--where you experience as much physical discomfort as you do while attending Mass each Sunday?

For a place to be so triumphantly uncomfortable, someone must have deliberately gone about defining a church building as a structure that must maintain an ambient temperature no lower than normal body heat while being furnished with wooden benches that have "Property of the Inquisition" stamped on them.

Let's begin with the temperature. Churches are hot. Like the places recalcitrant inmates get sent to on the silver screen when insane prison wardens bark to sadistic guards: "Put him in the hole!"

Ever notice how every wedding includes someone who faints from the heat? Ever been to a funeral where people don't take up origami in order to fold the missalette into some semblance of a Southern belle's fan? By the time the eulogy comes around, your Uncle Ralph looks like Scarlett flirting with Rhett.

In the winter, people tramp to church in overcoats and boots because they want to stay warm when it's freezing and snowing outside. So what do Catholic churches do? They turn the heat way up--just past the point on the thermostat that reads: "Below decks on a Roman galley." The result is that the members of the congregation begin frantically shedding their coats, scarves, and gloves in order to balance their temperature. Instead of communal prayer and singing, you get a group strip--and pews that look like bargain shelves at K-Mart.

And in the summer, when it's blazing outdoors, churches respond in the way any huge, impersonal institution would that cares nothing about its customers: They get hotter. With nothing to doff, worshipers weakly wave bulletins at their faces while dreaming of getting outside where there's at least a breeze. You can't crack a window, of course, because church windows are like Tylenol bottles: made not to open. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the bottom of the window pulls in, creating an aperture the size of a mail slot so you can dangle your tongue out, like a panting poodle trapped in a Pontiac at the strip mall.

Meanwhile, every other building in town had air conditioning installed the same year Hugh Downs got acne. The town library, the grocery, and the reception room at the pet cemetery are all cool and pleasant places to be in August. But not church. It's as if the pope had issued an encyclical against Freon and proclaimed that it was a sin to attend Mass if your underarms aren't squishy.

Inside these sweltering buildings, designers have followed a simple and age-old credo: "God said: Let there be no light." Massive structures of dark stone are lit by four vigil lights that give off fewer lumens than an elderly glowworm with a busted rheostat. Any light that tries to penetrate from the outside is strained through stained-glass windows. Very attractive, but impossible to read by. Barred from perusing the missalette to prepare for Mass, people begin to look around. That's when many of them notice a tiny detail: Their view of the altar is blocked by a marble pillar the size of a sequoia.

Before Mass begins, you sit back, trying to relax and put your mind in a spiritual state. However, there is no furniture less conducive to prayer than the common pew. ("Pew" was the one-word review by the perceptive critic who saw the first one come off the assembly line.) Most of these benches are constructed to hold people who are about five feet tall and weigh 90 pounds dripping wet (which they often are in the summer). The average American Catholic's rear end does not fit on the average pew. It's like trying to balance a watermelon on a broomstick.

To add to the pain, the bench is carved from hardwood, often with an inadequately padded cushion thrown over it as a mocking afterthought. This pillow has the same cushioning effect as wearing a rubber surgical glove to catch pitcher Randy Johnson's best fastball. Besides which, the pillow slides along the highly polished pew wood--and so do you, until you both drip over the edge like rain over an eave.

And when you kneel you discover that the kneeler is even harder and narrower than the pew. Designed by someone who apparently never actually saw a human being, the kneeler has the unusual quality of being recessed so far under the back rest of the pew in front of you that you can't form a straight line from your kneecaps to your chin. Therefore, instead of praying, you begin to experiment an anatomical engineering.

To give the illusion of kneeling, lots of people give up and simply half-sit back on the pew's edge. Then, when it's time to stand up, they're trapped by the kneeler, which catches their feet. They scrape their shins while rising and angrily slam the kneeler into its upright position (perhaps mentioning Jesus as they do). In that mood, it's time to offer a sign of peace to your neighbor.

By the way, if you're a regular churchgoer who has become accustomed to such discomforts, think of the Christmas and Easter Catholics whose only experience of churches is worse. On those holy days, the church is even hotter because more bodies are crammed in. It's SRO: Sweating Room Only. The service also lasts longer because it's filled with incense, hymns, and the inevitable homily about how people should love to come to church. That means that disaffected Catholics who might be considering a return to their faith get the following firm impression: Going to Mass on Sunday is an uncomfortable experience that involves standing and perspiring for more than an hour. Gee, do you think they'll choose to sleep in next week?

Analysts have blamed the falloff in Mass attendance on everything from the church's stand on birth control to lousy preaching. It's time for someone to look at the church building itself and realize that it inspires the same question spurred by prisons and Spice Girls concerts: "Who would want to go in there if they could avoid it?"