Just yesterday, some readers of my previous post about the Sagrada Familia and Antoni Gaudí made the old necessary uproar about “priorities.” Next to war, mass poverty, the tragic buffoonery of a president, and the escalation of bloodshed in the conflicts we fund, surely now is not the time to be thinking about “beauty” and, above all, cathedrals.
Religion has been at the center of many of the world’s fears for centuries. Including ongoing maintenance, Barcelona’s Basilica will cost nearly $1 billion.
The more common sense among us, aware of the false equivalency but unable to ignore the question, still wonder: What does beauty have to do with justice? What is “just” about beauty? And if religion is about morality, what about the poor? Especially when most of us are wealthy compared to many countries in the world.
Jesus often finds himself in trouble because he said, “The poor will always be with you,” as if poverty were no problem, especially next to the luxurious ointment poured out in his praise.
However, Jesus did not say this as an excuse for indifference. And the first to oppose “priorities” was Judas, who in the Gospel of John asks why the perfume was not sold and the money was not given to the poor.
What Jesus clearly meant was not that poverty is permanent and therefore tolerable, but that while love for the poor is a permanent obligation, this moment of costly kindness towards himself will never come again. Although Judas was correct in arithmetic, his heart was incorrect. When Mary saw dedication, he saw waste. He invoked justice to rebuke beauty, but Jesus rejected that condition.
In a world where beauty is forbidden, the poor cannot be helped. They are harmed by a world where beauty is only for the rich.
There is a deep irony here. Antoni Gaudi, the artist behind the Sagrada Familia, lived this problem himself. Successful and well-paid in his youth, he gradually gave himself up to the Catholic faith and the cathedral, until he had little left of his own. He left his fashionable room for a modest workshop, donated much of his earnings, fasted strictly, dressed poorly, and increasingly looked more like a beggar than a famous architect. For him, beauty was not an escape from poverty. It required its own poverty.
That poverty haunted him until the end. On June 7, 1926, Gaudi was hit by a tram while on his way to confession. Because he was poorly dressed, unshaven and without identification, he was mistaken for a homeless man and taken to Santa Cruz Hospital, a hospital for the poor. By the time his identity was discovered, it was too late. He died three days later and was buried in the crypt of the cathedral where he had given his life.
This week, exactly 100 years since Gaudi’s death, Pope Leo XIV will visit Barcelona and offer a completely different blessing in two Catholic churches. First, he will meet with Catholic charities and welfare organizations in Santo Agusti. Santo Agusti is a modest church, often referred to as the “Cathedral of the Poor,” located in a densely populated, mostly immigrant neighborhood. He will then celebrate Mass in the spectacular Sagrada Familia.
The contrast is too beautiful: the poverty of late afternoon and the beauty of evening. But maybe that’s the point. Where the church is most wrong is when it chooses one at the expense of the other.
So imagine a cynical onlooker asking him, “You proclaim your respect for the poor. Given the wealth of the Vatican, what are you doing about poverty?”
Like Gaudi, Pope Leo would not be offended by this question. “There is never enough. There will never be enough. But we respect the poor by refusing to make beauty the privilege of the comfortable. We feed people, we give them shelter, we give them justice. But let’s not pretend that ugliness is more moral. The poor need bread, shelter, dignity, and beauty that they cannot otherwise have.”
Religion has caused terrible harm. But no tradition can be understood only in its worst terms. To judge Christianity solely by its worst disciples is to distort the truth.
The poor are patronized by the wealthy, unable to realize that they are complicit in what they claim to deplore. It is easier to give untold amounts of money to alleviate poverty than to ask what makes such poverty profitable.
Jesus was not sentimental about this. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Your opinion and sympathy are not there. Even where your politics lie. where is your treasure?
Gaudi answered that challenge with his life. He did not glorify poverty. He simply dedicated his labor to a beauty that no private owner could possess.
notes and reading
Gaudi: Biography – A controversial Catalan masterpiece, a symbol of artistic integrity that defined modern architecture. Gijs van Hensbergen (2003). Van Hensbergen is an art historian, Hispanist, and author of the following books: Sagrada Familia: The astonishing story of Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece (2018).
“History of the Cathedral”—sagradafamilia.org.
“It’s never too little and it’s never too late. ” — Gabriela Saldivia, NPR, June 9, 2026. Saldivia is a digital editor and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning journalist.
barcelona babel
hyperpolitics
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
