Pope Leo XIV held Mass at Barcelona’s Sagrada Família basilica on June 10 and blessed the Tower of Jesus Christ — the completed central spire that makes the building the world’s tallest church at 566 feet — in a ceremony that marked the 100th anniversary of architect Antoni Gaudí’s death and the completion of a building begun 144 years ago.
Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday blessed a giant new tower at Barcelona’s famed Sagrada Familia Basilica after celebrating mass inside what is now the world’s tallest church.
A fireworks and light show illuminated the exterior of the temple at the end of the ceremony, bathing the unfinished basilica in shifting colours that highlighted its towering spires. A choir of 600 singers performed at the service which lasted around 90 minutes and was attended by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as well as King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia.
The timing of the ceremony — on the 100th anniversary of the death of Antoni Gaudí, the extraordinary Catalan architect whose life was consumed by the building’s design — gave the event a commemorative dimension that reached back across a century of Spanish history. Gaudí died on June 10, 1926, struck by a tram three days earlier and not initially recognised when he was brought to hospital. He was 73. He had spent 43 years on the Sagrada Família. He never saw it completed.
The stained-glass windows in various colours shone brightly in between the tree-like columns of the basilica as Leo delivered his homily in Spanish, Catalan and Latin.
“This cross shines by day, reflecting the sunlight, and shines by night, illuminating the city like a lighthouse overlooking the Mediterranean,” the pope said in his homily.
The Building and What It Represents
Sagrada Família’s distinctive Modernist basilica has been under construction for more than 140 years but, in February, work finally finished on the central Tower of Jesus Christ, which stands at 566 feet high and is crowned with a gigantic five-story ceramic cross.
The event, the highlight of a weeklong trip to Spain for Leo, comes 144 years after construction on the unfinished modernist basilica began and 100 years since the death of its famous architect, Antoni Gaudí. Standing 566 feet high and crowned with a five-story ceramic cross, the central Tower of Jesus Christ is the highest of 18 adorning the Sagrada Família, a bucket-list item for most travelers to the city in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region.
The Sagrada Família is not like other great churches. Chartres Cathedral, Notre-Dame, St Peter’s Basilica — these are buildings of formal grandeur, their architecture speaking the language of institutional power and theological tradition. The Sagrada Família speaks a different language entirely: organic, biomorphic, its towers resembling stalactites or the trunks of ancient trees, its facades so dense with figurative sculpture that they read as explosions of compressed narrative.
Gaudí took over the construction of Sagrada Família in 1883, a year after the first cornerstone was laid during the pontificate of Leo’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII. “We are all the living stones of this edifice,” Leo said from the altar of the basilica.
The coincidence of names — Pope Leo XIV blessing a building begun under Pope Leo XIII — was noted by observers as a historical parallel that Gaudí himself might have appreciated. The architect was deeply religious; he spent the final years of his life living at the construction site, attending Mass daily, and offering his own wages for the building’s expenses when funds ran short.
The Challenges That Nearly Stopped It
Leo’s visit commemorates the legacy of Gaudí, whose radical, modernist designs were mocked in his lifetime but have subsequently been celebrated.
The central ceremony will be presided over by Pope Leo XIV, who will be called to bless the basilica’s central tower in an event that is part of the completion of the building designed by the Catalan architect
The building’s survival across 144 years required overcoming obstacles that would have defeated less committed communities. Gaudí’s death in 1926 removed the only person who fully understood the building’s three-dimensional logic. The Spanish Civil War brought new devastation: in July 1936, anti-clericalist groups stormed the basilica, burned the crypt and Gaudí’s workshop, and destroyed many of his plans, models, and technical drawings.
Gaudí’s nature-inspired designs feature 18 towers representing biblical figures and facades depicting Jesus’s life.
The recovery from the 1936 destruction required extraordinary archaeological and architectural detective work — reconstructing Gaudí’s intentions from photographs, surviving plaster models, and the logical extrapolation of his known design principles. AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor. Jordi Faulí, the chief architect currently overseeing the works, said Gaudí equipped his successors with a design logic which has been helped by the use of digital modelling software, 3D printing and industrial robots.
The combination of Gaudí’s mathematical and biological design logic with 21st-century digital modelling tools has made it possible to complete what one man designed but could never have built alone. The Sagrada Família is, in this sense, a collaboration across time — Gaudí’s vision, interpreted and executed by generations of architects, craftspeople, and engineers who came after him.
The Ceremony and Its Significance
At the end of the service, the US-born pontiff blessed the Sagrada Familia’s soaring central Jesus Christ tower which was completed in February, bringing the basilica to its maximum height of 172.5 metres (566 feet). The peak deliberately falls short of the 177 metres of Barcelona’s Montjuic hill — an act of religious respect from Gaudí who believed the hill was the work of God.
That detail — a 566-foot tower that deliberately stops short of a 581-foot hill — captures something essential about Gaudí’s approach. The building that has been called the most ambitious architectural project in the world was designed by a man who believed there were things greater than architecture, and whose design made that belief physically visible.
People crammed windows and on balconies all around the square to watch the scene.
In a widely hailed development, the central Tower of Jesus Christ was completed in February, bringing the Basilica’s height up to 566 feet and earning the structure the designation of world’s tallest church.
The Sagrada Família’s completion — or rather, its completion as a structural form, since interior and exterior decorative work continues — arrives in a world in crisis. The building has survived a civil war, a pandemic, the death of its architect, the destruction of its plans, and 144 years of intermittent funding, political change, and urban development around it. It is still standing. It is now, finally, as tall as Gaudí ever imagined it would be.
In a week when the United States bombed Iran’s oil island, when Ukrainian children were being pulled from rubble, and when the ceasefire that had held since April was breaking down, a 144-year-old building was completed with fireworks and a 600-voice choir. Both things happened. Both are true. The world contains them simultaneously.
LoudFact.com is an independent global news and explainer platform. This report is based on reporting from the Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, GMA News, Art Net News, and the Sagrada Família Foundation as of June 10, 2026.
