Praying for the dead [Purgatory]

CIN ^ | Father Brian Van Hove, SJ

[Some hope remaining.]

Looks like I killed the thread on praying for the dead.

[Tantumergo]

Well its nice to see someone having the last word with Matchett PI and showing how totally unreliable his "facts" are.

Nice post

[The_Reader_David]

At one level the Orthodox and Western accounts are similar--there are temporary, provisional states of the soul after death. The primary difference is that the West conceives of the temporary state (purgatory) as a form of created grace, a part of salvation, while the Orthodox regard it as an unnatural consequence of death itself.

Rambler's question about Alaskan Orthodox spirit houses is interesting. Orthodox missionaries often found it useful to "baptize" native customs which accorded well with the Orthodox faith. It is precisely because of the patristic teachings concerning the soul after death that the Alaskan natives who built spirit houses were permitted to continue the custom after their conversion: they are considered a place where the soul may be localized during the 40 days.

An interesting side-light to this is the fact that, despite the efforts of St. Innocent, the first Orthodox bishop in Alaska, the Tlingit did not convert to Orthodoxy until after the Seward Purchase, when faced with the choice of essentially forced conversion to protestantism, or embracing Orthodoxy, the chose the latter because the Orthodox would permit them to keep most of their traditional culture. And, they embraced Orthodoxy to the extent that now, if one converts to Orthodoxy in a Tlingit region, one may be told "You're Tlingit now" (very much like my mother-in-law's "We're all Greek now.").

[Rambler]

Fascinating. Thanks for the history.