It has been a long time since Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote the Divine Comedy, a monumental epic poem whose crowded, fetid and horrifying hell has been much more attractive to readers over the centuries than the long-awaited paradise. Well, the candidates to be condemned to a refined eternal ridicule without quarter are legion. While there are rather few who arrive at the gates of heaven only for Saint Peter to send them to hell. Purgatory remains for the ambiguous, the faint-hearted, who are the majority, that is, neither so good nor so bad, neither meat nor fish.
There are several European places that boast of having the door that gives access to purgatory or hell, one of them being nothing more and nothing less than the top of Canigó. In the summer of 1276, King Peter the Great climbed alone to the top of this Pyrenean mountain to face the terrifying monster that dwelt in its dark bowels, just like Saint George against the dragon. At least this is what the historian Salimbene of Parma (1221-1287) tells. Whether it was true or not is not important, the important thing is that his subjects believe it.
The Galician Benedictine Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676-1764) collects in his Universal Critical Theater a trip undertaken in 1328 “by an Aragonese or Catalan knight named Ramón de Perellós, viscount of Perellós, lord of the barony of Seret” to distant Ireland, with the purpose of crossing the door that gives access to the Cave of San Patricio, that is, to the Purge himself. thorium, which was -and is, for believers- on Station Island, a small island in the middle of Lake Derg.
According to the chronicles of the time consulted by Feijoo, in addition to Perellós’ own Viatge al Purgatori, the reason for such an arduous journey was none other than to find out if the soul of Don Juan I, King of Aragon, was in purgatory. But these writings have little or no credibility, since they place this king in purgatory sixty-seven years before his death in 1395, not to mention twenty-three years before he was born, since he was born in the year 1351, so Feijoo infers that this relationship was forged by some “equally ignorant and idle” Catalan.
Be that as it may, the story was widely disseminated throughout Europe, to the point of turning the Purgatory of Saint Patrick into a place of pilgrimage that Pope Alexander VI tried with little success to stop in 1497 without success. To this day, it continues to attract believers eager to purge themselves of their sins. Also, in times closer to our own, it attracts both Irish Catholics and Protestants, which is certainly something really unusual.
Now, Feijoo wonders not only if all those who enter the cave share the same vision, but if there weren’t among them fakers, hypocrites and pretenders, who would lie blatantly about what they saw and experienced in the cave, without ever doubting the sanctity of Patrick, who after all is the one who brought the good news of the Christian faith to the Irish pagans. And since faith moves mountains or the fervor of believers lends itself to inventing all kinds of miracles that they attribute to the saint of their devotion, it is convenient to take with caution the stories that surround the Cueva de San Patricio, such as the one that maintains that the saint threw all the poisonous vermin from Ireland with his staff or that if someone had the temerity to introduce any on the island, they would die instantly.
But the indefatigable reader Feijoo found in Topographia Hiberniae, by Giraldo Cambrense (1146-1223), that three centuries before the Anglo-Raman Patricio set foot on Ireland, Cayo Julio Solino had already affirmed that the island was free of all poisonous vermin.
Who to believe? Since man is man and woman is woman, in matters of faith the source matters little, as well as in this secular world that we have invented. There are even low cost flights that transport us to hell or purgatory of our choice. You can even access them without leaving home. It is better not to talk about paradise: it has long ceased to be a destination for the masses.
