Gaudí: God’s architect

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1:51Querido Antonio Gaudí, Acompáñanos desde el cielo en nuestro camino de cada día. Ayúdanos a vivir nuestro trabajo con amor y reflexión para que podamos comprender la sabiduría que Dios nos revela a través de la creación. María Teresa de los Ángeles is a nun in Cardiz, in the south of Spain, and almost every day she prays to the architect, Antony Gaudí. His unusual buildings are some of the most famous in Spain. You might know him as the architect behind the Sagrada Familia, the enormous basilica in Barcelona, which is still under construction after more than 140 years. To some, he's known as God's architect.

2:35And right now, a committee in the Vatican is deciding whether this architect will be made a saint. Pope Francis, in one of his last official acts before he died, put Gaudí on the path to sainthood. This is the documentary. from the BBC World Service. I'm Max Holbury, and on this episode of Heart and Soul, which explores approaches to spirituality from around the world, I'm in Barcelona, in Spain's northern region of Catalonia. I'm here to understand why Spain's most famous architect could very well become a saint.

3:28I talk to him like he's a friend, a friend in the sky, a friend in heaven. More than anything, that's my relationship with him, a dialogue. But why do you pray to Gaudí of all people?

3:44Well, I really don't know. It's a good question. There's a theory that the saints choose us as well, in order to make a connection from heaven to earth. I knew only that he helped architects, and I wanted to ask on behalf of a friend of mine who's an architect. And when I felt listened to, I became interested in his life. Then I fell in love with his work and his art and his way of being. And that's how I began this sort of relationship between heaven and earth. entre el cielo y la tierra. María Teresa de los Ángeles praised the Gaudí despite having never visited Barcelona or any of his buildings.

4:29No, no he podido. Pues en ese caso es un poco interesante que elegiste rezar a él. Sí, sí, sí, es muy particular. What would it mean for Gaudí to be made a saint? Creo que puede cambiar mucho la visión que tenemos de la... I think our idea of holiness can change. We can understand that it's not just relegated to the cloisters or the church. And in fact, lay people and professional people, artists, also have that holiness in their way of living. And whatever aspect of human life can be full of holiness. Cualquier aspect of human life can lead to the fullness of the sanctity.

5:25I've come to the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. It's one of the oldest parts of the city. It's also now one of the most touristy. And I'm standing in front of the Cathedral of Barcelona.

5:43It's a reminder of that typical Gothic style you see across Europe. In fact, at the very front, there's a particular seat where Gaudi would sit and pray. and from that position, if you look at the stained glass window, there is one very small panel that actually has a striking resemblance to the main towers of the Sagrada Familia. I've come here to meet with Archbishop of Barcelona, Cardinal Juan José Omeya. He now heads the official association that is working towards Gaudi's sainthood and liaises with the Vatican.

6:35The saint becomes a model, believable, real, recognizable, valued by everyone, so that his life can help us. Any layman can be a saint, because it's from the same nature as Gaudi. He's a professional, he's an architect, he's a scientist. He lives a life of prayer, and that's in the reach of everyone. He lives a professional life, and we all have a profession. But in addition to that, he's serving the poor. And those three things are what gives us the path to sainthood for all of us. And he lives it, and he becomes a role model from the 20th century for all of us.

7:14One of the qualifying elements that the Vatican will be examining in the case of Gaudi's sainthood is whether there have been any miracles. There have been many testimonies of people who have prayed to Gaudi and found employment, cures to their medical ailments, and any variety of spiritual guidance. Some have been so moved by his work they have converted to Catholicism. So to understand why Gaudí is on the path to sainthood, we have to look at the way he lived and what he created.

7:49In churches, the teachings and the things they want to show, they usually have on the inside. Gaudí puts it all on the outside. He puts the Bible on the outside. the first facade of the basilica is the birth of Jesus. The second facade is the passion and the death of our Lord. He also puts that on the outside. And why does he put it all on the outside? He says, I put it on the outside so that anyone who doesn't want to go inside or doesn't have a faith can ask himself, why? He's evangelizing. This is an evangelist. This is a saint. He shows, but he doesn't oblige. He suggests. He invites. It's respectful of the faith of others.

8:29He invites you so that you can discover what he has discovered.

8:49Depending on what time of day you walk into the Sagrada Familia, the church will be illuminated in a different colour. The stained glass windows on the eastern side are a mixture of cool blues and greens. It almost makes it look as if you're underwater. Millions of people every year from all over the world and from all different backgrounds enter through the nativity facade and are overwhelmed by colour. I don't really know what I expected. It's just like another building. And I just started crying because it was really out of beauty. I thought that the inside of this church was the most beautiful thing I ever saw, I think.

9:37In the afternoon, the western windows bathe the basilica in a fiery red or yellow. As I walked through the doors, I just, I started weeping, like full, ugly crying in this church. I'm not a religious person, and I just stood at the back of this church and cried. I couldn't believe that humans could imagine and create something so breathtakingly beautiful. And when you look up, the columns go up and up and then split off like branches of a tree. and they hold up a ceiling adorned with what look like bursts of sun.

10:18I was speechless. I was inside some man-made forest, an enormous forest. It was the feeling of being both inside and being a spectator, the enormous columns and the light which is so beautiful. It's overwhelming.

10:39The otherworldly feeling is slightly undone by the constant sound of drilling and hammering that echoes through the space. It has been under construction since 1882. Gaudi's vision was so expansive and so ambitious that he knew well that he would never live to see more than a fraction of its completion. So what makes his architecture so special? Jordi Fauli is the head architect at the Sagrada Familia.

11:08of El Alma. He knows a lot the soul of the people and he was thinking in the soul, was thinking in the other people when he was designing his different buildings. So he was thinking of people's souls while he was designing them. I thought that he not only was thinking in the space, was thinking in the client, he was thinking in the people that in the future will look his words. He wanted that the people feel something in his heart. sin of living in his works, his beliefs. And, I mean, people do feel something. I mean, it's, you know, whether you're religious or not, when you walk in it, you really, it has an impact.

11:52I think he was a complete architect, like few have been in the history of architecture. When I say complete, he was an architect who had a command of structures, a command of materials, that had an extraordinary command of light, of colour. He made an architecture that was new, look into the future that would help lift people's spirits.

12:16And what will it mean, do you think, if he becomes a saint?

12:23He would be the first architect saint, and this is important for architects and for believers, and for everyone it's important, in the sense that it's not just the architecture. There has to be a life behind it which the church believes is holy. But how did his faith influence his way of working?

12:49Cardinal Juan José Omeya.

12:54Antony Gaudi had a very contemplative vision of nature, which he puts in his work. The great architect of the world, he says, is God. And God talks to us through nature. And he realized that. In the Cathedral of Barcelona, he would sit in a little spot, meditating and writing and drawing. So his great masterpiece, the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia, he creates in contemplation, in prayer. But he doesn't stay alone in a personal prayer. He makes it for the benefit of others. He says, workers are in the image of God, and I have to help them so that they can eat and educate their children. And so, what does he do?

13:32He gives a salary to his workers, and he builds for them a small school so that their children can learn, and in the future, they too can have a profession. That is social action. But it comes out of a contemplation of God and of seeing that God is in the poor, and you have to serve God through the poor.

14:13From the BBC World Service, this is the documentary.

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15:23I'm Max Horbury, and I'm in Barcelona for heart and soul to find out why the architect Anthony Gaudi could be made a saint.

15:47The outside of the Sagrada Familia is pretty overwhelming. When you look at it, it's hard to let your eyes settle on any one thing for too long. It's overflowing with detail, telling the entire story of the Christian faith. Ever present, of course, is scaffolding, netting and cranes slowly twirling overhead. At ground level, there are giant slabs of concrete and stone. There are models in mosaics and men in hard hats busying themselves before the worst of the Spanish sun forces them to stop. In June 2026, after countless delays, the main tower of the basilica is due to be completed, just in time for the hundred-year anniversary of Gaudí's death.

16:40But it will be a long time still before the whole Sagrada Familia is finished. Gaudí's architecture, impressive as it is, is not the only reason he's been considered for sainthood. It is also how he lived. So who was the man, Antony Gaudí? Born in 1852 in Reus, then Catalonia's second largest city, he came to Barcelona to study architecture and quickly stood out. One teacher is reported to have said he was either a genius or a madman. But how Gaudí, aged only 31, took over the design and construction of the Sagrada Familia is something of a miraculous story in itself. A year into the project, the man in charge, José María Bocabella, fired his first architect and went searching for a new man.

17:32In the middle of the night, he has this dream where he's going to see a man with ginger hair and blue eyes and who's going to come to be the saviour of the Sagrada Familia project. Geis van Hensbergen, Gaudi's biographer and author of a book about the Sagrada Familia. And the next day he goes to the studio of Martorell and there in the back he sees a ginger-haired, blue-eyed man focusing, as Gaudi always did, with absolute kind of obsessive attention to detail. Well, this is an architect who hasn't done nothing of his own apart from design his desk, his visiting card and assisted other architects.

18:17And suddenly he's launched into the largest building project of the 19th, 20th and now the 21st century. So who is Gaudi at that moment? I mean, paint me a little bit of a picture of who he was at this particular moment in time. Well, when he was at university, he would use his brother to wear in his shoes for him, for instance. I mean, dandy and I wouldn't go as far as Oscar Wilde, but certainly he was someone who would go to the opera, would be seen around. Apparently he fell in love as a young man with a woman, but he is so slow that she's already married by the time he asks her out for a coffee.

19:01But I think for him the most profound and shocking thing, and I think this is one of the first crises that starts leading towards a far deeper and profound architect, is in 1876. Within months his elder brother dies, his mother dies just months later. and Gaudi learns something which is going to become fundamental I think in his philosophy of life which is that suffering and going through suffering like Christ it's both cathartic but it's also something which kind of crystallizes and what comes out at the other end has been purified through suffering. And so does this inform how he approaches the Sagrada Familia?

19:47I think you know there are rumours of course that he was slightly anti-clerical in his youth well which student isn't but so what I mean in the end what comes out and I think begins to start happening is when he gets that commission of the Sagrada Familia he's beginning along life's learning curve both of architecture and of faith and it deepens and it deepens and it deepens and he's very lucky because immediately he's invited to the top table. He now knows all the bishops in Catalonia. He's friends with them. He sits at their table. He debates. He argues. He learns. He listens. He reads his Bible.

20:30He reads his Live of the Saints on a daily basis. I mean, he was someone who led a very monastic life, off in the evening, every evening to confession in San Felipe Neri, down in the Barry Gothic, and then he'd come back, he'd be on his own, maybe have supper with the with the local priest, Mosangil Párez, but apart from that it would be straight back to the drawing board, muddling with little models. There's nothing I can see in his character, nothing I can see in his architecture, which would suggest anything else but pure devotion and someone who was thinking of remapping, in a sense, what the possibilities of architecture are.

21:27Although he designed and built many other buildings, Gaudi worked on the Sagrada Familia for more than 40 years until his death. On June 7th, 1926, Gaudi finished work for the day and said to one of his workers, come early tomorrow, we're going to make beautiful things. He walked from the basilica to the Gothic Quarter for his daily confession, and on the way he crossed the road and was hit by a tram. He was dressed so shabbily he was mistaken for a homeless person and left to bleed on the side of the road. He died three days later in hospital, aged 73. It's its own miracle that work has continued on the Sagrada Familia.

22:12During the Spanish Civil War, anarchists broke in and destroyed Gaudi's models, drawings and instructions. And despite wars, dictatorship, multiple governments and changing fashions, work on the Sagrada Familia has continued. But how will the Vatican decide whether Gaudí will be made a saint?

22:38When many people say that this man died and lived in a saintly way, we begin a process of studying if it's true. For that, we create a group of people, historians, theologians and scientists who study his life, his work, and they present their findings to the Vatican, and it's then studied in the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. They decide whether there is a virtue of saintliness in this man. And if so, the Pope declares him venerable. For the next level, which will be declared blessed, there has to be a miracle. And we have a miracle, presented to us by a father on behalf of his son who is ill in the Netherlands.

23:19And the doctors say that, surprisingly, he's been cured. And so they have to study that in the Vatican. They get a commission of scientists and doctors who will examine it. And if they decide that this really has been a miracle, because this cure isn't explained by human means or by medicine, then they present it to the Pope. And the Pope says, I recognize this miracle and will declare him blessed. And then there would be another step, which would be sainthood, for which there would need to be one more miracle. So minimum two miracles in order to be a saint. Pope Francis declared Gaudí venerable just before he died, the first step towards sainthood.