The announcement from the Vatican on 14 April was a momentous day for architecture: the first time an architect (Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, 1852–1926) has been declared “venerable”, a step towards sainthood. While there is still a way to go in the canonising process (a couple of miracles are still needed to proceed with beatification), the decree by the late Pope Francis means the architect of Barcelona’s iconic basilica, Sagrada Família, is now officially on the sainthood path.

No architects have been in this place before. Not many artists have achieved saintly status either. If Gaudí gets there, he will sit alongside the likes of Saint Catherine of Bologna (1413–1463), a nun in the Order of Saint Clare, canonised in 1712 for her beautifully illuminated manuscripts and, more recently, early Renaissance friar and painter Fra Angelico, famed for his frescoes, who was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982. 

Typically, the journey to saintliness involves a close examination of one’s life and how well one has lived as an exemplar of the Catholic Church’s teachings, values and virtues. Pain, suffering, abstinence and martyrdom help. Gaudí scores highly on this front, especially from age 31 onwards, when he took over the role of the architect of the basilica, working on it for 40 years, exclusively for the last 12 years of his life. Already devout in his Catholic faith, abstemious and a vegetarian, Gaudí leaned into an ascetic, frugal and celibate lifestyle as he got older. He was known for extreme Lenten fasting, on one occasion almost starving himself to death as he tried to emulate Jesus Christ and fast for 40 days. Gaudí was hit by a tram on 7 June 1926. Because of his tattered attire and unkempt appearance, he was not recognised and was taken to the city’s hospital for the poor. He died three days later.

Gaudí wasn’t always so pious. In his early years, he was very much a man-about-town — a dandy architect — who would bark orders from his carriage window without getting out. Some highlight that he was an active Freemason, a doctrine largely incompatible with Catholicism. Then there are those who knew and worked with him who say his temperament was far from saint-like and found him egocentric, prideful and bad-tempered.

All this falls by the wayside when you take on board the main reason for Gaudí’s candidacy. To the Association for the Beatification of Antoni Gaudí, which has  been pushing for it since 1992, the architecture of Sagrada Família is an expression of profound spirituality. Or, as Pope Benedict put it in 2010, the basilica “stands as a visible sign of the invisible God, to whose glory these spires rise like arrows pointing towards absolute light and to the One who is Light, Height and Beauty itself”. In other words, in Sagrada Família, Gaudí is channelling something else — his faith. Hence “God’s architect” — a label first used in 1926 in a book of commemoration after Gaudí’s death. 

Generally, the Catholic Church prefers evidence of medical miracles to advance the cause of canonisation, and the Association has been collecting reports of answered prayers to the architect. According to the Archiwik “Gaudí Beatification” page, these include: Montserrat Barenys, an artist whose sight was restored after praying to the architect when she was diagnosed with a perforated retina; a man from Chile who says he was cured of cancer; and a mother who entreated GaudÍ to become “the architect of my daughter’s spine” as she was undergoing a new treatment for lumbar scoliosis.

Archiwik also refers to a growing movement within Catholicism to acknowledge a broader and more modern definition of the miraculous, including the power of conversion to Catholicism. Examples attributed to encounters with the architecture of the Sagrada Família include construction workers working on the building and Jun Young Joo from South Korea, who converted from Buddhism and wrote: “Through the works of Gaudí and the divine touch that they have, I was convinced of the existence of God.”

Can a building be miraculous? You could argue that the fact that Sagrada Família is to be finally completed in 2026 is the real miracle — a miracle in which New Zealand architect Mark Burry played no small part. Burry’s engagement with Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece began in 1979 when he became involved in the process of trying to figure out the master’s grand design. When Gaudí died in 1926, little was left to go on. Burry and others working on the project knew they were following in the footsteps of a genius, but one who operated intuitively and didn’t draw much or write much down. The few drawings and models that were left had been destroyed, the plaster models smashed to pieces by anti-clerical anarchists who attacked the church in 1936, burning Gaudí’s workshop. Yet, somehow, despite some naysayers, the force, whatever it was, that animated Sagrada Família’s fantastical free forms, modelled on nature — organic, eccentric and of a plasticity that defies logic — lives on. That’s some kind of miracle.