In his essay The artistic and religious vision of Gaudí –in Quaderns Crema–, Francesc Pujols maintains that the Sagrada Família is, in reality, the tomb of Catholicism. Pujols writes: “Instead of being [Gaudí] the builder of the first cathedral of the True Religion, he had the misfortune of being the builder who began, without finishing it, the last cathedral of the greatest of false religions, and even sadder for a Catalanist like him who loved Catalonia so much, the builder of the last temple of the religion of the Jews, he, who could have been the builder of the first temple of the religion of the Catalans [...]”. When he speaks of the True Religion, thus, in capital letters, Pujols refers to this Catalan religion, or that of the Catalans, of which he himself is the founder, publicist and, if necessary, prophet. It is simultaneous and parallel to Catalan science, which Pujols also made known, with identical enthusiasm.Pujols found parallels between the Sagrada Família and the Carlist Wars, and between Gaudí and the feared General Cabrera. Even more: Pujols claims to have heard Gaudí say that the distance separating classical art from Gothic or Romantic art is the same as that from Aeschylus' Orestes to Shakespeare's Hamlet. What Shakespeare would have done with Hamlet was not to create a new character, but to deform an ancient one. Gaudí, with the Sagrada Família, would have achieved a syncretic prodigy that fuses Hellenic art with Baroque, and with Gothic, and even (I quote Pujols) "with the great architectural conceptions of India, to which Gaudí did not want to have any kind of kinship, despite having it, because, as the universal genius he was, he not only had relatives everywhere and at all times, but he inherited them, accumulating inheritances and bringing them to the streets of Barcelona". Dalí said that the best that could be written about Gaudí had already been written, and it was Pujols' text.Perhaps Leo XIV and his entourage should take into account the observations of Francesc Pujols, who also prophesied that the day will come when Catalans, when traveling the world, will have everything paid for. Speaking of paying, papal trips, with their exorbitant cost (this one now amounts to 25 million euros) recall the evangelical passage of the merchants in the temple, when Jesus gets angry.In return, it is clearly better to receive a pope who defends the poor, immigrants, and the helpless than one who aligns with the powerful and exploiters. It is good to receive a brave pope who issues an encyclical against technofascism instead of a calculating and cynical one who would favor it or remain neutral. It is good to receive an anti-Trump and anti-MAGA pope who, when in Spain, does not hesitate to stand before Congress to make a proclamation in favor of democracy and against the far-right. Such a pope is not so far, depending on how you look at it, from Pujols' True Religion. And it contributes to the Sagrada Família being the tomb, not of Catholicism, but perhaps of national Catholicism and its ideological heirs.
