A Celestial Architect?

By ROBERT HUGHES

Heaven, at least in theory, is open to everyone, but nobody knows how full it is, or how long the waiting list in Club Purgatory. Relatively few people are acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church as having made it through the pearly gates. Those who are, and have been canonized, are designated as saints. They have God's ear; they can intercede with him on behalf of the living: if you have lost your car keys, you can say a prayer to St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost objects. The saints are distinguished by their virtue and piety, and it is remarkable how few practitioners of the arts there are among them. The only painter ever canonized was St. Luke, but he was one of the four Evangelists. No novelist or dramatist has ever been elevated to sainthood. Nobody, in the eyes of the church, ever tap-danced his or her way up the stairway to paradise. And the celestial city does not seem to have needed architects, since (one presumes) God designed all of it.

It is just possible, however, that this last situation may change. In Barcelona a movement is stirring among the city's Catholic hierarchy to push for the beatification and eventual canonization of Antoni Gaudi I Cornet (1852-1926), designer of the unfinished church of the Sagrada Famolia and the greatest architect that Barcelona, or Spain itself, has ever produced. Back in 1992, the auxiliary bishop of Barcelona, Joan Carrera, called the beatification move "a legitimate and reasonable proposal." In a pastoral letter last Aug. 23, Ricard Maria Cardinal Carles declared his intent to begin the long and labyrinthine process toward beatifying "the universal Catalan architect." There is even an Association for the Beatification of Antoni Gaudi, headed by an architect named Jose Manuel Almuzara.

Gaudi was obsessively pious, especially in his old age. He used to shuffle around the streets of his city nibbling on crusts of bread and seeking alms for the building of the Sagrada Famolia. He hated liberalism and was devoted to everything most penitential and reactionary in Spanish Catholicism. He was gloomy, short-fused, arrogant--the Christian virtue of humility was never his forte--and so misogynistic that he never married and probably died a virgin. Of course, such traits have never disqualified anyone from sainthood, and nobody would doubt that Gaudi was in a general way a more saintly character than, say, Frank Lloyd Wright or Philip Johnson. But there is a deeper problem: the absence of miracles, which the Vatican authorities need as "verification of godliness." Mere piety is not enough for sainthood. No worker, so far, has fallen from the Nativity Facade of the Sagrada Famolia and been caught by an angel; no Japanese tourist has burst out with stigmata in the ticket line. The best that Almuzara and his devotees have been able to come up with is a student who thinks Gaudi helped her pass her exams and a woman who claimed that after praying to Gaudi, she was cured of a kidney stone. But on such mini-events you could probably also mount a campaign for St. Francis Gehry or St. Norman Foster.