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kosta50 wrote: "Since the 16th century the Catholic Church officially teaches that the departed stand in need of purification ... what is being described is a state of the soul, not a place
I never implied that the Purgatory is a "place" any more than to imply that Heaven or Hell is a "place." The important thing is that the Church didn't teach it as dogma for fifteen centuries. So, that means that the early Church teachings were either deficient and incomplete or that somehow the state of lesser knowldge of the world did not necessitate such teaching."

Ok, let's talk about Purgatory. I can only give you my impression of this doctrine, where it came from and why. And as I have said before, I have no religious training and have never been "catechized", so understand that whatever I say here is the opinion of an American Catholic, and not the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Tantumergo is an ordained minister of the Church, and it is to him, especially, that we can turn should what I have to say here stray far off the reservation of orthodoxy.

The starting point for my understanding of the idea of "Purgatory", which I agree with you, Kosta, is a state of the soul and not a place as such, is our most ancient tradition of all: the Jewish Scriptures. Specifically, to a passage in a book of those Scriptures in the Septuagint Canon which Catholic and Orthodox share, but which Jews later abandoned, followed even later by the Protestants.
The text that gives rise to the concept of a cleansing of the souls of the dead is found in the histories, specficially 2 Maccabees 12:39-46.
I quote here the New American Bible:
"On the following day, since the task had now become urgent, Judas and his men went to gather up the bodies of the slain and bury them with their kinsmen in their ancestral tombs. But under the tunic of each of the dead they found amulets sacred to the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. So it was clear to all that this was why these men had been slain. They all therefore praised the ways of the Lord, the just judge who brings to light the things that are hidden.
Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out. The noble Judas warned the soldiers to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen.
He then took up a collection among all his soldiers, amounting to two thousand silver drachmas, which he sent to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice. In doing this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection of the dead in view; for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death. But if he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought.
Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be freed from this sin."

Now, let's think about what this ancient part of our written Scriptural tradition says here. And as we think about it, we will realize why it is that Jews and "Grace Alone" Protestants centuries later both had powerful theological reasons to get rid of this book of the Septuagint canon.

The dead in this passage are already dead. They aren't passing away. They've been dead for a couple of days. The living discover, in preparing them for burial, that they are all guilty of idolatry, a sin that doomed them to die and, in the context of a belief in the afterlife and the judgment of God, damned them as well. Being dead, there is nothing more that any of these dead soldiers can do, in life, to expiate their sins. But note the thing that Judas Maccabeus does: he prays for the dead. He collects alms for the dead so that rites of atonement will be performed for their souls, and their sins will be blotted out and not held against them. This presents a real theological conundrum...one so severe that the "One conversion, one grace, one salvation, one judgment to eternal life or eternal hellfire" crowd at the onset of the Protestant Reformation SO objected to that they solved the problem by simply discarding this book from the Bible. But, of course, we Roman Catholics and Orthodox cannot do that. The Septuagint is the very oldest part of our Tradition. It is not optional, but binding upon us. It is the inspired Word of God, and we have to accept its implications. And the implication here is that with death already past, that the condition of the souls of the dead in the afterlife can be ameliorated by the pious acts of the living. If one thinks of the implications of this, they are that perhaps there is one death and one judgment, but that judgment by God is not a simplistic "pass/fail", eternal life/eternal damnation, all in one shot. Even our earthly judges are much more sophisticated than that. A man may be condemned to life in prison, and yet our judges modify life sentences with the possibility of parole, with time off for good behavior. The sentence is binding, and is a permanent judgment, but the judge himself often adds different stages of punishment, with punishment intended as correction.
Indeed, the whole concept of gradations of sin is exemplified by Jesus' comments that 'all blasphemies of men will be forgiven, but those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven.'

There is something going on in 2 Maccabees 14:39-46 that cannot simply be ignored. The dead are gone, but the final outcome for those dead souls can still be modified by atonement made for them by the living. That implies that all of those souls that died in a state of blasphemous sins had the trajectory of their afterlife altered, because their sins were helped to be blotted away by the pious prayers of others. And that inexorably implies a purification. A soul that dies dirty with blasphemy and goes to God covered in that sin has its status changed afterwards. That is not the full grown doctrine of "Purgatory", but certainly there is a purgation going on.

If one did not have this passage of Maccabees to be concrened with, one reads some of things that Jesus said very differently. I will not dwell on all of the passages of which Maccabees inflects our understanding, but will focus on one important example, at Matthew 18:23-35. Again, I quote Jesus from the NAB:
"That is why the kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who decided to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began the accounting, a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way of paying it back, his master ordered him to be sold, along with his wife, his children, and all his property, in payment of the debt. At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.' Moved with compassion the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan. When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a much smaller amount. He seized him and started to choke him, demanding, 'Pay back what you owe.' Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
But he refused. Instead, he had him put in prison until he paid back the debt. Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master and reported the whole affair. His master summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?'
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt.
My heavenly Father will treat you in exactly the same way unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart."

Alright, now, here Jesus' point here is clearly one of forgiveness: as you forgive, so shall you be forgiven. But what if a man is not so forgiving, or imperfect in his forgiveness? What if he falls under the last sentence of Jesus' warning. It is easy to read this parable as saying that the unforgiving man is sentenced to Hell. And that is how Protestants read this too. But if you read it very closely and think about it, that is NOT what Jesus says. Jesus says his heavenly father will treat YOU just like the king treated the merciless creditor. But how was that? The king did NOT sentence the merciless creditor to death. He sentenced him to be tortured in the dungeon UNTIL HE PAID BACK ALL HE OWED.

Now, again, the Protestants will gloss that since the dead can repay nothing, and nobody can repay a debt to God, that means Hell, and that's an easy enough thing to accept if one has no 2 Maccabees 12:39-46 in one's Bible. But we Orthodox and Catholics DO have that book and that passage, and in that passage, men go to God with a terrible debt, but are redeemed by the atoning prayers on their behalf made by other men.

In other words, those souls that died with the amulets went "unshriven" to the dungeon and the torturers, but not forever, and were pardoned.

What the passage I have cited in Matthew, taken in juxtaposition with the passage from 2 Maccabees, is that the afterlife is more complex than the simplistic Heaven/Hell dichotomy of the Protestants. There may indeed be but one judgment, but the implication of these two texts read together is that God's judgment can be at least as nuanced and sophisticated as our simple human judgments are: we do not sentence every heinous criminal to death. We sentence most to periods of penitentiary and labor, followed by gradually lessening restrictions. And Jesus' parabolic king, the type of God in the parable, did NOT sentence the merciless creditor to death (Hell). He sentenced him to a period of torture UNTIL HE HAD PAID BACK ALL HE OWED.
Without Maccabees, that could be allegory for Hell.
But given Maccabees, it implies a period of repayment for the debt of sin. In other words, Purgatory.

I would challenge the assumption that this was all made up as a Catholic doctrine in the 1600s. No. It is in a book of our Bible that predates Christ by over a Century, and in the Gospels themselves.

Of course, the hows, whys and wherefores of all of this are pretty vague in the Bible. That there is an implication of some sort of progressive purgation of sins is there from the passages I have cited and more. The exact structure of how it all works is not laid out. And OF COURSE the relentlessly rational West put its mind to the subject with a will, putting a forbidding non-Biblical and non-traditional name on what is in truth a Tradition of the Bible. What the Catholics, at a certain point, started calling that process of "repaying every last debt" for the unshriven and the unatoned for, was "Purgatory". In the same epoch, of course, the Western Church drove the logic of 2 Maccabees to the nth degree, as rationalistic Westerns will, and started calculating the effect of indulgences with (pretended) mathematical precision, and selling them. "For every pence dropped in the plate, a soul is released from Purgatory" and all of that spurious nonsense.

Those excesses are embarassing, because they exceed what the written Tradition can say with any certitude.
That there IS a purgation we can read from the Gospels and the Maccabees. That we do know. The parameters of it we don't, and we needn't vex our minds with the problem if we remain shriven of our sins through regular Confession and the Eucharist, and avoid sin.
At least we can be comforted that if our state is impure at death...as many if not most people are...there is authority in the written tradition called the Bible that suggests that the game is not over and lost, but that God still provides a saving catchment.
...of course there is ALSO authority in the written Tradition called the Bible that implies that is not the case, so one cannot come to any conclusion based on Scripture alone. That is why God left a Church during his sojourn here, and not a Bible dispensary.

That said, we CANNOT take the Renaissance Church's mathematical precision on sold indulgences seriously. Indeed, it is an embarassment. Of course God never let the Church state that this was a doctrine of faith and morals that could not be challenged, thereby allowing the embarassing episode to pass without permanently marring the future doctrines of the Church. It DOES mar our history, and warns us of the tendency of even the most pious to become presumptuous.

Spelling out the boundaries of Purgatory and selling tickets for early release was presumptuous. But reading the Bible and seeing that the bare bones of a Purgatorial STATE are indeed there in the most ancient tradition is not only not presumptuous, it is necessary. The Bible implies some sort of Purgatory. We need not call it that, although there is nothing wrong with calling it that either. We need to not attempt to speak authorititatively about the boundaries of this state or place that amounts to an "equitable power of God" (to put it in legal terms).
Instead, we need to speak authoritatively about the Sacraments God instituted, of Confession and Reconciliation and Communion and Extreme Unction so that nobody has to become a Pharisee and start counting his "get out of jail" chits for the afterlife.

Purgatory was not made up out of wholecloth by the Catholic Church in the 1600s; it's been in the Bible since 100 BC. The Catholic Church did go overboard in applying mathematical rationality to something that, if we listen to Jesus and the Apostles, we ought not to have to spend time worrying about anyway. (But of course the Western mind, being relentless calculators, had to seek the loopholes and attempt to develop them.)

I'll leave it at that.