The Temple Nobody Paid For

On the tenth of June, Pope Leo XIV inaugurated the Tower of Jesus Christ - the newly completed central spire of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. At 172.5 metres, it is now the tallest church in the world. The date was not accidental: it fell exactly one hundred years after Antoni Gaudí was struck by a tram on the Gran Via and died, three days later, without ever seeing the building finished.

I was not there, but I have been following the coverage with something I can only describe as moved bewilderment.

It is not the images I cannot stop thinking about. It is a single word, buried in the building's full name, that most people walk past without noticing.

The building is not simply the Temple of the Holy Family. It is the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family. An expiatory temple is one funded through alms - through penitential offering. The theological concept is specific: not merely giving, but atoning. An expiatory gift is not a donation in the modern sense. It is an act of devotion that is itself the point. The giving is the prayer.

The project began in the 1870s with a Barcelona book merchant named Josep Maria Bocabella, who had grown alarmed at the rapid secularisation of his city. He founded an association, wrote and sold a devotional magazine, and gathered, subscriber by subscriber, a community of the faithful. By the time he had enough, the association had 600,000 members. Not the Vatican. Not the Spanish government. A book merchant and his readers.

Gaudí took over as architect in 1883 and gave the building his life - literally. He spent his final decade living inside the Sagrada Família, his bed moved into the workshop, accepting no salary, turning down all other commissions. When friends suggested this was excessive, he told them his only client had all the time in the world. On the seventh of June 1926, he walked out and was struck by a tram. He was carrying nothing that identified him, was taken to a charity hospital, and died three days later. The building was perhaps a quarter done.

It continued anyway. The Civil War came; anarchists destroyed the original drawings and plaster models. It continued anyway. Decades of controversy followed - architects arguing that completing it without Gaudí was a kind of fraud. It continued anyway.

One hundred and forty-four years of continuous, voluntary financing. No endowment, no institutional patron, no government guarantee. Just an accumulated, freely renewed decision by an enormous number of ordinary people - subscribers, pilgrims, ticket buyers - that this thing deserved to exist.

The great public buildings of the world are, almost without exception, products of power. We have learned, from the Forum and Versailles, to read magnificence as the expression of concentrated authority. The Sagrada Família is the opposite of that. It is what happens when the motive is not power, but devotion.

The Catholic Church did not build it. People did. And they are still doing it, right now.

It's an extreme version of something we recognise in miniature every time we commission a piece for The Leopard - work worth doing slowly, by hand, whether or not anyone is in a hurry to see it finished. Shop our artwork, made in the same spirit.