The Catholic teaching on purgatory is that it has nothing to do with eternal fate. One’s eternal fate is settled when one dies believing in salvation by God’s grace alone and sorry for one’s sins or the opposite. Those who reject God, whoi refuse to repent, go to hell, not purgatory. No one is in Purgatory who will not end up in heaven. It has nothing to do with anxiety over going to hell. Everyone in Purgatory knows he will go to heaven. Period.
This article totally and completely misrepresents Catholic teaching on Purgatory.
It does not say the unsaved go to purgatory ...
Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise”, not you’ll someday be with me in paradise after you’ve gone through a purgative fire for several thousand years.
This was a doctrine purely and simply invented by and exploited by a church that had a monopoly on doctrine and sought to extract as much money from the populous as they could. It was the famous rejoinder “a penny in the coffer sings, a soul from purgatory springs”, along with the selling of indulgences that prompted Luther to seek the real church. Roman Catholics have been reeling for years since.
Good point. It reminds me of quote by Bishop Fulton Sheen. “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”