By Mario Laghos, European Conservative. (Photo: Ellie Deakin/Unsplash)
Europe still inhabits the house that Christianity built. The question is whether it still understands the foundations.
June 10 marks the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death. Outside Spain, few people are likely to notice. Yet the anniversary arrives at a remarkable moment.
At the same moment, Pope Leo XIV—the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church—is visiting Spain. Europe is simultaneously commemorating the anniversary of D-Day, the Allied landings in Normandy that helped liberate the continent from Nazi domination. And in Barcelona, the recently completed Tower of Jesus now rises above the skyline of the Sagrada Família, fulfilling one of Gaudí’s most enduring ambitions.
None of these events are directly connected. Yet taken together, they form an unusual constellation of symbols. They invite a question that extends far beyond Spain, beyond Catholicism, and perhaps even beyond Europe itself: Can a civilisation survive once it begins to forget the story that gave it meaning?
History rarely repeats itself. But it often returns in unexpected echoes. On 6 June 1944, thousands of young Americans landed on the beaches of Normandy. Their mission was military. Their sacrifice became part of Europe’s collective memory. The Allied invasion opened the path to the liberation of Western Europe and helped shape the political order that emerged after the Second World War. Eighty-two years later, another American arrives on Europe’s shores. This time the visitor comes not as a soldier but as a pope.
The comparison is not political and certainly not military. Yet the symbolism is difficult to ignore. The Europe that Leo XIV encounters is wealthier, safer, and more technologically advanced than the continent liberated in 1944. Yet many Europeans increasingly speak of a different kind of uncertainty: demographic decline, cultural fragmentation, weakening religious belief, and a growing sense that the continent no longer knows how to describe itself.
Decades ago, Pope John Paul II precisely identified this problem. In Santiago de Compostela in 1982, he issued what became one of the defining appeals of his pontificate: “Europe, be yourself.” The phrase was neither a call for nostalgia nor a political programme. It was an appeal to memory.
John Paul II understood that civilisations are sustained not only by institutions and economies but by stories, symbols, and shared convictions. A society may lose wealth and recover it. It may suffer military defeat and rebuild. But a society that loses confidence in its own inheritance faces a deeper challenge.
That question has acquired renewed relevance in Barcelona. Only weeks ago, the Tower of Jesus was completed atop the Sagrada Família. Crowned by a monumental cross, it now dominates the basilica designed by Antoni Gaudí and stands among the most ambitious religious structures ever built.
For Gaudí, architecture was never simply architecture. It was theology expressed through stone, geometry, colour, and light. His buildings were designed not merely to impress observers but to orient them. Everything pointed beyond itself. Everything directed the eye upward.