God’s Architect

June 1, 2026

The Church marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Venerable Antoni Gaudí as work on the Basilica of the Sagrada Família reaches a major milestone

By Columbia staff

June 1, 2026

Pilgrims walk beneath the branching columns and stained-glass windows of the Basilica of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. — Pilgrims walk beneath the branching columns and stained-glass windows of the Basilica of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona on Feb. 3. The church has become the city’s most iconic landmark and the tallest church in the world. (Photo by Josep Lago / AFP via Getty Images)

“I do not know if we have awarded this degree to a madman or to a genius,” declared Elies Rogent, director of the School of Architecture in Barcelona, after 26-year-old Antoni Gaudí received his diploma in 1878. “Only time will tell.”

Time has rendered a clear verdict not only on Gaudí’s genius, but also on its inseparable connection to his Catholic faith. That union of artistic vision and religious conviction gave rise to the Basilica of the Sagrada Família (Holy Family) — a majestic “Bible in stone” that attracts millions of visitors each year as one of the world’s most recognizable churches.

On June 10, Pope Leo XIV will celebrate Mass at the basilica to mark the centenary of Gaudí’s death. The Holy Father will also bless the newly completed central Tower of Jesus Christ, which now makes the Sagrada Família the tallest church in the world. The occasion comes just over a year after Pope Francis declared Gaudí venerable, recognizing his heroic virtue and advancing his cause for canonization.

Antoni Gaudí is seen in the earliest known photograph of the architect, taken in 1878. (Photo by Pau Audouard / Public domain sourced / Access rights from P.D.Enhanced / Alamy Stock Photo)

Born in 1852 in the industrial Catalonian city of Reus, in present-day northeastern Spain, Gaudí developed an early fascination with craftsmanship, nature and the play of Mediterranean light. Frail health often kept him close to home as a child, sharpening his attentiveness to the natural world that would later define his architecture. “I captured the purest and most pleasurable images of Nature,” he later recalled, “the Nature that is always my Teacher.”

A devout Catholic and daily communicant, Gaudí believed beauty should direct the human soul toward God. When he took over the Sagrada Família project in 1883, a year after construction began, he developed a singular architectural language that fused biblical symbolism, Gothic inspiration and forms drawn from creation itself. The basilica’s façades are adorned with plants, animals, saints and scenes from Scripture, while the interior rises like a luminous forest, its branching columns supporting vaults bathed in shifting color.

The poet Joan Maragall recounted Gaudí’s description of the basilica’s light: “He told us that, as the upper parts of the church would be pierced or perforated, they would let in rays of light at sunset that would fleck everything with light, without showing where they emanated from. ‘Like in a forest, exactly like in a forest,’ he would repeat, with the serene and smiling exaltation of a visionary.”

St. John Paul II visited the church in 1982, when it was still commonly known as the Sagrada Família Church of the Atonement. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it for worship in 2010 and designated it a minor basilica. Today, the Sagrada Família and six other Barcelona buildings designed by Gaudí are UNESCO World Heritage sites.

In his homily at the basilica’s dedication, Pope Benedict explained that Gaudí sought to unite “the three books that nourished him as a man, as a believer and as an architect: the book of nature, the book of sacred Scripture, and the book of the Liturgy.” In the Sagrada Família, these three books became stone, glass and light.

Four of the 18 towers adorning the basilica, topped by Gaudí’s hallmark mosaic pinnacles, rise over Barcelona. (Photo by Pep Daudé / courtesy of the Sagrada Família Foundation)

Gaudí devoted the last 12 years of his life exclusively to the basilica’s design and construction. “A church is the only thing worthy of representing the soul of a people,” he said, “for religion is the most elevated reality in man.”

When Archbishop Francesco Ragonesi, the apostolic nuncio to Spain, visited the Sagrada Família in 1915 and gazed upon the masterpiece in progress, he reportedly told Gaudí, “You are the Dante of architecture.”

Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Gaudí’s masterwork is animated by the love of the Triune God — a love reflected, in the Sagrada Família, through the life of the Holy Family. That vision gave shape to Gaudí’s art, his faith and his joyful sense of vocation. “My surname comes from the Latin gaudere,” he once said, “which means ‘joy.’”

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Read more about Venerable Antoni Gaudí here.

Antoni Gaudí (third from left) accompanies bishops during a visit to the Sagrada Família on July 2, 1915.

God’s Architect

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