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Besides that has never been how purgatory was described to me or anyone else growing up in the RCC. It was a place you spent hundreds or more years in, in purifying fire, to ‘take care’ of the sins you had committed before you died but didn’t do penance for. That is exactly how the nuns described it, that was how the priests described it. That was how my religious education teachers talked about it. It was most certainly NOT EVER, EVER talked about as being instantaneous; the entire emphasis about purgatory was that most people were going to be spending a great deal of time there. That was why we said masses for people. That’s why we prayed for people to get out of purgatory. They were still saying masses for people hundreds of years ago to help them get out of purgatory.

Same here. Exactly.

Uncounted years of torment in purgatory were the best one could hope for since it meant that at least you didn't have to go to hell forever and you had the hope of seeing heaven some day far in the future.

We were raised EXPECTING to suffer for an indefinite but decidedly certain LONG time.

I don't know who raised you or who taught you.

There also seems to be a trap here. I did my own researches. I read at least as much Aquinas before I became Catholic as I have read since 12/26/94. I read a good deal before then, and I continue to read. One of the first things that became clear was that the scarey, self-hating, fearful Catholicism you all describe was as bogus as anything ever was.

Secret Agent Man's depressed priest may have been a good friend, but he was a lousy theologian and teacher. The promulgators of the idea of a vengeful God looking for an excuse to punish those who pass notes in class or who once had an impure thought were LOUSY evangelists and dreadful (in every sense of the word) Christians.

And yet if I say so, somehow it becomes MY fault that you were deceived into believing some Jansenist horror-story instead of the Gospel and wrong of me to point out the vicious and cruel heresies of your teachers.

I am fortunate to have escaped their blasphemies and sadism, and can laugh, with my friend Fr. Scordo, at "Sister Mary Sadistica" and "Sister Mary Yardstick" as bogies from a nightmarish fairy tale.

What I find, when I listen NOT to some two-bit disappointed priest or sister who has found that children are harder to control than he or she thought they would be and who has resorted to terror and pain in a faithless abandonment of Love and patience, but to the cheerful greats like Chesterton and Belloc and Dante, is:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There's always laughter and good red wine.
At least I've always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!

They lied to you. Maybe unwittingly, but they lied. May God heal their faithlessness.

But, there is some culpability in acting like children when one is grown up. If you will go to Fr. Juan O'Malley Montini who likes his "good red wine" more than his studies and believes him rather than doing one's own homework then one has to take a little responsibility for not knowing one's faith.