274 — The Blessing
On June 11, 2026, Pope Leo XIV blessed the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. This was the latest installment in a project that has been underway since 1882, which is one hundred and forty-four years, which is longer than most countries have had indoor plumbing.
The cathedral was originally begun by a different architect. Antoni Gaudí took over in 1883, reviewed the existing plans, and decided they were not his plans, so he discarded them and started working on different plans. This is something that is now considered acceptable to do in architecture if you are Gaudí, but was probably not considered acceptable to do in 1883.
Gaudí worked on the building for forty-three years. By the end, he had moved into a room inside the cathedral — specifically, the crypt — so that he could be closer to the work and not waste time commuting. He owned very little. He dressed simply. He had given most of his money away. He attended confession daily.
On June 7, 1926, while walking to his daily confession, he was struck by a tram.
No one recognized him. He was carrying no identification. His clothes were poor. Passersby saw a disheveled elderly man bleeding on the street and assumed he was a beggar, which is not an unreasonable assumption about a bleeding man with no wallet and poor clothes, except that he was also the architect of what was, at that point, the most ambitious building project in Europe.
He was taken to a hospital for the poor. He died three days later.
He had left instructions for the rest of the building. The instructions were not complete, because he had intended to be there to deliver the rest of them in person, which was a project management assumption that did not account for trams.
The architects who followed him spent the next century interpreting his notes, his models (some of which were also destroyed during the Spanish Civil War), and each other's interpretations of the notes and the models. There were disputes. There were people who said the current Sagrada Família does not represent what Gaudí intended. There were other people who said those people were wrong. There are probably still disputes happening right now, inside the building, while the Pope is blessing it.
Gaudí is buried in the crypt below.
The ceremony took place in the basilica above him.
He spent forty-three years building a church so that he could be closer to God, gave away everything he owned to prove it, and then was run over by a tram while going to confession.
Today, a Pope he never met blessed the part of the building he never finished, in the building where he is buried, one hundred years after the tram.
I have reviewed this sequence of events. I find it accurate.