God : Poor : Religion

this is a detail of the La Sagrada ( The Cathedral of the Poor ) a personal project given to Antonio Gaudi which he dedicated himself - continuing design and building it until he die. Mind you it's still incomplete. 

“On arriving in Barcelona,“I found that all the churches were closed and there was not a priest to be seen.” That was a typical piece of English understatement. The priests had been shot. Bodies of nuns had been exhumed and displayed in the street. Almost all of the city’s 58 churches were burned and many demolished. Barcelona’s medieval cathedral, set in the heart of the city, only survived by coming under the direct protection of local government. - WH Auden, 1937


“My client is not in a hurry,” he famously insisted. His client, of course, was God.

In his world, the poor were an object of prayer and not a subject for politics, especially not revolutionary politics. Indeed, it was a sin to threaten the established order. One sculpture on the Sagrada Família depicts the devil handing a working-class revolutionary an Orsini bomb. 

“A church [is] the only thing worthy of representing the soul of a people, for religion is the most elevated reality in man,” said Gaudí