By Alan Ford
Published in Studies in Church History, January 2025.
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Abstract

Patrick’s purgatory in Lough Derg, Donegal, is one of the great medieval pilgrimage sites. On the extreme edge of Europe, it physically embodied the theological idea of purgatory, offering pilgrims a this-worldly encounter with its horrors. Despite Protestant efforts to destroy it, it survived the Reformation and posed a classic challenge for Protestant and Roman Catholic historians. For the latter, it exemplified the continuity of Catholicism in Ireland from Patrick to the present, a living embodiment of the unchanging loyalty of the Irish people to their national saint. For Protestant historians, it was, like purgatory, a twelfth-century invention, revealing both the medieval corruption of the Roman Catholic Church as it added non-scriptural embellishments to the Christian faith, and the superstition of Irish Catholicism. The interaction, and tension, between theological belief and historical objectivity was to prove a persistent challenge for both sides, right down to the twentieth century.