After a 35-year campaign, Barcelona’s most famous architect, Antoni Gaudí, designer of the still-unfinished La Sagrada Família, has officially been made a candidate for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.
The process is long and uncertain but, if he is beatified, he would be the first architect – in the modern sense of the word – to be made a saint.
Pope Francis got the ball rolling Monday when he issued a decree declaring the venerability of seven people – five diocesan priests from Europe, a founder of an order of nuns in India, and Gaudí.
The decree issued by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints proclaimed his “heroic virtues”, which, like martyrdom, provides justification for opening the case for his canonisation.
Gaudí proponents now need to find two miracles that can be attributed to the architect’s “intercession”, reports the Catholic News Agency.
Designing for quick construction will not be one of them: Work on La Sagrada Família began in 1882 and it’s still not finished, although it has long been a fully functioning basilica. An ambition to complete it in 2026 was thwarted by the covid pandemic.
Gaudí began personally overseeing the work in 1883, and he was still working on it when he was hit by a tram in 1926, dying three days later, unrecognised, in a hospital for the poor in Barcelona.
A lay campaign for his canonisation began in 1992, and the Archdiocese of Barcelona formally took up the cause in 2003.
It remains to be seen what happens first, if either ever happens: the completion of the basilica or the advent of “Saint Antoni”.
- Subscribe here to get stories about construction around the world in your inbox three times a week
Further Reading:
