Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture by Diana Walsh Pasulka (review)

This book gives a certain appearance of being a scholarly treatment of the doctrine and popular reception of purgatory from the Middle Ages to the present, but the appearance turns out to be illusory. Pasulka approaches her subject with enthusiasm, but unfortunately the theology of sin, forgiveness, and satisfaction has escaped her. There is no mention of contrition or repentance in her book. She speaks, on the one hand, of “absolving afterlife sin” and performing penance after death as a means of avoiding hell; and, on the other hand, of pilgrims effecting their salvation while still alive by visiting St. Patrick’s Purgatory (pp. 40–42).

In her introduction, she sets the stage by referring to the decline of interest in purgatory since the Second Vatican Council, claiming that the Council itself supported the de-emphasis. Then, rather than giving a general history of purgatory, she concentrates mainly on medieval Ireland and modern America (from the nineteenth century onward). For the Middle Ages, she spends most of her time on stories of St. Patrick’s Purgatory (located on an island in Lake Derg in County Donegal), as if this constituted the main or only idea of purgatory in the Middle Ages. She does not treat standard devotions, like offering Masses and other prayers for the delivery of souls from punishment.

Chapter 1 is titled “When Purgatory Was a Place on Earth,” and chapter 2 is subtitled “Moving Purgatory Off the Earth,” which indicate Pasulka’s belief that there was a gradual progression from thinking of purgatory as earthly to regarding it as nonearthly. However, it is important to know that purgatory was generally seen to be in an “infernal” location—that is, under the earth. St. Thomas Aquinas was typical in considering the hell of the damned to be in the lowest position, with the limbo of infants above it, purgatory above that, and the limbo of the fathers (which was emptied when Jesus “descended into hell”) the highest (3 Sent. d. 22 q. 2 a. 1 sol. 2). But in addition to the common or general purgatory, a soul by divine dispensation could be purified or partially purified in a specific place in the upper world, which would serve as a “special purgatory.” In the most popular book of the Middle Ages, Jacopo da Varazze’s Legenda aurea, St. Patrick’s Purgatory is regarded in two ways: first, as an entrance to the common purgatory (Feast of St. Patrick), and then as a special purgatory (Feast of All Souls). Furthermore, the idea of the subterranean levels of “hell” (including the temporary hell of purgatory) lasted into the seventeenth century (e.g., Suarez, Opera 4:627–28).

In chapter 3, Pasulka treats John England, first bishop of Charleston, and his 1840 article “On Certain Superstitions Imputed to Catholics: Concerning the Fable of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, and Some Other Foolish Inventions of the Protestant Press,” which may or may not include his response to an 1824 attack on the doctrine (her notes are sketchy, and she provides no bibliography). Chapter 4 deals with views of purgatory between 1830 and 1920, branching out to France and England as well as looking at America. The fifth and last chapter treats of “purgatory apostolates” that have developed after the Second Vatican Council to bring back the devotion as it existed before the Council. Pasulka’s treatment is not systematic: she says she has studied eighteen such apostolates, but she does not list them. She spends a good deal of time discussing her interviews with Susan Tassone, “[t]he most popular author of contemporary purgatory devotional literature” (p. 18), but she names only one of her works, Praying with the Saints for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, without giving details (it was published by Our Sunday Visitor in 2009). However, her accounts are interesting, and often touching, showing, as Pasulka says...