Heaven Can Wait, as Diana Walsh Pasulka describes it in her introduction, “traces the purgatory problematic,” in particular what she identifies as “the problem of purgatory's materiality” (9). In the text's five chapters, she examines selected sources on purgatory from the twelfth century through the twenty-first. Central to her discussion is the pilgrimage site in Ireland, Lough Derg. The first chapter, “When Purgatory was a Place on Earth,” introduces its unique identity from a local pilgrimage site whose harsh environs, including a cave, attracted Irish penitents, to a sacred site important enough to appear on medieval and early modern European world maps as “St. Patrick's Purgatory.” The cave of Lough Derg appears in “eleven extant poems” in “Irish bardic tradition” (48) and the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii (circa 1180), “one of the most popular stories of medieval era” (53). The widely reproduced tale features Owen, a repentant Crusader, who reveals his death-defying “physical journey” into a cave of purgatory (55). The second chapter explores the tension between, in the author's phrasing, “scholastic rationalism and metaphysical dualism” (in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) which disallowed purgatory's materiality and the “on the Ground” (70) understanding of Lough Derg. Here, Pasulka discusses the Lough Derg's place in Irish “myths” involving a Celtic warrior, Fin Mac Coul, and a Christian saint, Patrick. Remnants of their battle with a serpent are Lough Derg's red-tinged lake (the serpent's blood) with rocks (the serpent's body) jutting from its surface. This “blood sacrifice” establishes “a connection between gods and humans” (77). The cave provided by the Christian God continues the myth, according to Pasulka. Here, “humans can literally peer into the afterlife and otherworld.” (77). The chapter concludes with criticisms of Lough Derg not only by skeptical Irish Protestants, but also by early modern European church officials who sought (unsuccessfully) to destroy the cave in 1497. A cave is filled in, but another cave soon appeared to beckon pilgrims to the site.
These early modern Catholic and Protestant objections provide a transition to the third chapter's account of the Enlightenment-inflected apologetics of John England, Irish immigrant and Bishop of Georgia and North and South Carolina (1820–1842), set within the transatlantic world of political revolutions. Using The Miscellany, England's U.S. newspaper, she discusses the prelate's criticism of Irish superstitious practices associated with Lough Derg and his rational defense of the doctrine of purgatory. She also features an opponent, a pro-revolutionary Venezuelan diplomat, Luis Mendez, whose polemical work appeared in The North American Review (1824). The fourth chapter examines purgatory-focused periodicals (1830–1920). She examines the influence of nineteenth-century English Catholic converts, John Henry Newman and, more significantly, Frederick William Faber, who “de-emphasized the material features of representations of purgatory” (121). The author also finds that Canadian and American periodicals “introduced a new concept of purgatory as reflecting ‘Divine Providence’” (132–133). The final chapter, “The Ghosts of Vatican II” considers twenty-first century “purgatory apostolates,” initiated and led primarily by lay men and women. Pasulka discusses these apostolates as a response to participants’ negative perceptions of Vatican II, in this case, for causing a diminishment in purgatory's significance. They recover and make accessible late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publications featuring purgatory's materiality.
Pasulka's book is especially significant in its sampling of transatlantic polemics concerning purgatory among Anglophone Catholics and Protestants and helps to illuminate the more distant origins in local Irish myths and their concomitant practices at Lough Derg. Her work also makes clear the long history of Catholics’ less-than-uniform accounts of “purgatory.”
The book's brevity and selectivity of sources raises as many questions as it answers. The argument could benefit from greater consideration of distinct meanings among purgatorial practices. A penitent's pilgrimage to St. Patrick's Purgatory, praying for deceased loved ones, and paying for Masses on behalf of loved ones, offer quite different points of access to and responsibility within the Catholic economy of salvation, where the threat of purgatory looms large. The book's argument needs to address more explicitly the technical use of “materiality” in contemporary religious studies and how it differs from the equally technical scholastic understanding of matter and form and the latter's relation to “spirit.” The assertion that scholastic metaphysics is dualistic, especially in considering the human as composed of body and soul, requires some recognition of the complexities of such a claim, as indicated in contemporary debates on how scholastics address the topic.
A certain lack of precision in historical details also detracts from the argument's effectiveness. In discussing Lough Derg, for one minor example, Pasulka concludes that “many Catholics believed that purgatory could be accessed in Ireland” (57). No footnote indicates how she arrived at this conclusion and the preceding argument does not establish this particular conclusion which is critical for her account of belief in purgatory's materiality. Who were they? How did they come to know? How do we know that they had arrived at this particular conclusion in the plain sense that her phrasing suggests? At several other points in reading the text, this reviewer wanted more than vague estimates or at least some reason why vague estimates are all that is available. Given the text's broad chronological range and the movement back and forth across centuries, more frequent inclusion of dates, and, in a few cases, accurate dates, would have assisted in following change over time. At times, the description of physical locales, like the Museum of Purgatory in Rome, required more details or careful distinctions to help the reader have an accurate picture of what was being discussed. In other instances, descriptions of Catholic ritual practices, such as contemporary liturgy of the Eucharist, borders on the inaccurate. Clearly Pasulka has covered a wide range of sources that would demand much of any researcher. Pasulka brings to the forefront in this text the longer history of the “purgatory problematic” that reaches from the harsh environs of Lough Derg well into the twenty-first century.
