Builders of Communion

June 1, 2026

In the late 19th century, Antoni Gaudí and Father Michael McGivney lived out parallel visions of faith in action

By Columbia staff

June 1, 2026

A detail of the Holy Family is seen on the Portal of Charity of the Sagrada Família’s east-facing Nativity façade. (Photo by Frédéric Soltan / Corbis via Getty Images)

At first glance, Venerable Antoni Gaudí and Blessed Michael McGivney would seem to have little in common. One was a Catalan architect whose masterpiece transformed the skyline of Barcelona; the other was an American parish priest who founded a fraternal society in New Haven, Connecticut. Yet the two men — both on the path to sainthood — shared striking convergences of time, circumstance and mission.

They were born just weeks apart in 1852. Gaudí, born June 25 in Reus, Catalonia, was the youngest of five children in a family of artisan coppersmiths and boilermakers. He later proudly recalled, “As a boy, I worked as a boilermaker.” McGivney, born Aug. 12 in Waterbury, Connecticut, was the firstborn of 13 children. His father, Patrick, was an iron molder, and Michael left school at age 13 to work in a local brass spoon factory to help support his family.

Faith and family were central and formative for both. As a student, Gaudí prayed the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception and absorbed the artistic and devotional environment of his childhood. McGivney, inspired by the parish priests of his youth, entered seminary as a teenager; the later death of his father made vivid for him the vulnerability of families left without a breadwinner.

The year 1882 marked a defining moment in both men’s legacies. Then in his fifth year of priesthood, Father McGivney incorporated the Knights of Columbus on March 29 to strengthen Catholic men in faith and provide financial protection for their families. Ten days earlier, on the feast of St. Joseph, the first stone of the Sagrada Família had been laid in Barcelona. Gaudí was not yet the lead architect, but he was likely present and would take over the project the following year.

Both men gave themselves to works larger than themselves. Llorenç Riber i Campins, a priest and poet who knew Gaudí, described seeing him at the construction site “among the magnificent dust and the jubilant music of hammers — which, to God’s ears, must have sounded like the music of harps; you would always see him laboring like Nehemiah when he rebuilt the holy walls, and speaking like someone enlightened.” In similar terms, Father Joseph P. Daley, a contemporary of Father McGivney, said the founder’s “special vocation was to develop Catholic manhood, to bind into one conspicuous solidarity all the elements that make for strength of character and so, indeed, to bring out that solidity of character … in its strength before the world.”

Both also understood that faith is lived in communion, not isolation. Gaudí gathered around him artisans, students, workers and friends, and treated their labor as a shared vocation. Chiara Curti writes in My Gaudí that he “carefully cultivated human connections” because he believed creativity was born “from encounters, from shared lives, from communion.” McGivney likewise gathered Catholic men into a fraternity rooted in charity, unity and practical responsibility.

While Father McGivney’s founding vision was animated by the needs of widows, orphans, fathers and young men, Gaudí, too, showed great concern for families and children. He built the Sagrada Família Schools so that workers’ children could be educated near their families, and he welcomed schoolchildren to the construction site so they could see themselves as part of the basilica’s future.

Finally, both men labored without seeing the full fruits of their work. When Father McGivney died in August 1890, two days after turning 38, the Knights numbered about 6,000 men; he could not have known the Order would grow to more than 2.2 million members worldwide. Gaudí died in June 1926, shortly before his 74th birthday, while construction on the Sagrada Família has continued for another century.

Undeterred by the slow progress of his life’s work, Gaudí once said, “The only thing that should concern us is to make it so well, so beautifully, with such magnificence and art that our successors will have no choice but to continue it.” He added, “My client is in no hurry.”

Father McGivney would have understood. Each man built for a future entrusted to God — one through a basilica, the other through a brotherhood — and thereby left living legacies of faith carried forward across generations.

Builders of Communion

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