c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

BARCELONA, Spain _ As I stroll around this marvelous city of whimsical architecture and energetic pedestrians in northeastern Spain, I wonder what sort of soul is on display here.

The Cathedral in Barrio Gotic seems somewhat restrained for a Spanish church. Much of the art in side chapels dates from the 15th century, after Christians had reclaimed their holy site from the Moors but before Columbus charted an ocean highway to gold. This older art is somber, almost brooding.

The 17th century side chapels, by contrast, are astonishingly ornate, with ranks of gold cherubs standing on gold thrones, blowing gold horns. These mountains of gold represent the ravaged land and forced labor of enslaved natives in the New World. Their story seems unrelated to the humble Prince of Peace, whose call was freedom.

As in any city, many historic vistas have to do with wealth _ mansions, luxury apartment buildings, temples to commerce, and of course the church. Did the men who poured their wealth into fantastical art nouveau architecture earn their money well? Or did they, like the robber barons whose mansions help to define Manhattan, live off the hard labor of others whom they scorned,”reaping where they did not sow, gathering where they did not scatter seed”?

In one day I barely scratch the surface of the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), whose curved surfaces, oozing balconies and striking colors gave birth to Barcelona’s unique Modernisme brand of art nouveau and dotted the Eixample section of Barcelona with exotic structures.

I do know that Gaudi was ridiculed for them at the time by intellectuals who must have sensed that, with Gaudi, the balance shifted. With Gaudi, the story being told was no longer their wealth, their grandeur, their ascendancy, but form, design, vision.

I make a pilgrimage to the still-unfinished Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia, the stunning church to which Gaudi devoted the last 12 years of his life, living like a recluse on the site and begging his contemptuous neighbors for construction funds.

Sagrada Familia has soaring bell towers shaped eerily like ballistic missiles and topped by Venetian mosaics resembling colorful candy suckers. One facade looks like a lava flow of biblical images tumbling over each other.

Who knows what story Sagrada Familia will eventually tell? Gaudi was a nationalist seeking to express Catalan’s medieval glory. For now his dream is still a construction site, littered with scaffolding, stone-cutting sheds and stray pieces of a puzzle, and a tourist mecca run by ticket-sellers.

Its story keeps changing. In the 1980s, artist Josep Maria Subirachs added a Passion Facade, shifting the balance again. It, too, harks back to knights in armor, but his figures are massive, sinister, more like the arrogant super-hero art of Stalinism than romantic idealism.

The figures have square heads, oversized muscles. Some wear medieval armor and look as if they could spring to life and whip Jesus again. Some wear the masks of midnight fascists. Nothing looks literal _ this is the city of Picasso, after all _ except one scene directly over the main entrance, where a sad-faced man surrounded by hulking figures holds open a shroud. On it is a painstakingly literal rendering of the face of Jesus.

Sagrada Familia is decades from completion. But it is hard to imagine its ever being a house of worship. What would be its focus? An architect whose wild imaginings stoked the dreamy flame of Catalan nationalism? A church whose usual gilded images of wealth and grandeur don’t seem welcome here? Wealthy patrons whose funds dried up long ago? Bleak images bidding an ugly farewell to the dictator Franco? Or the tourists, these latter-day pilgrims who flow prosperously from Barrio Gotic shops to Las Ramblas carnival to Gaudi to the nearby bullring, their pace set by mealtimes?

What I saw on my brief tour was head-shaking marvel at Gaudi’s gaudiness, but penetrating stares at Subirachs’ Passion. For if there is religious hunger in these showy days, it doesn’t seem to be a hunger for one more spectacle, but for the man who is shown tied to a stone post.

What we see of him is a back rutted with whip marks.

DEA END EHRICH