Purgatory in Catholics, Orthodox, and Evangelicals.

Christians and eternity Catholics have purgatory; Orthodox have a toll booth, and Evangelicals do not pray for the dead.
What is the Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Churches’ view of what happens after death?

Catholics have Purgatory. Orthodox have Purgatories; Evangelicals do not pray for the dead.

While the Catholic Church teaches purgatory and prays for the salvation of souls, the Evangelical Church does not believe in purgatory and does not pray for the salvation of the deceased. This is because they think prayer cannot change the soul’s fate after death.

“Those who die in God’s grace and friendship with God, but are not perfectly purified, although they are certain of their eternal salvation, undergo purification after their death to attain the holiness necessary to enter into heavenly joy,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about purgatory in paragraph 1030 and continues in paragraph 1031:

“This final purification of the elect, which is quite distinct from the punishment of the damned, is called Purgatory by the Church. (…) The tradition of the Church, referring to certain texts of Sacred Scripture, speaks of the purgatorial fire: it is to be believed that before the [last] judgment there is a purgatorial fire for certain light faults, because [He who is] the Truth says that if anyone has blasphemed against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, neither in this age nor in the age to come (Mt. 12:31). From this statement it can be understood that some trespasses may be forgiven in this age, while some in the age to come.”

The Catechism further explains that this teaching is also based on the practice of praying for the dead. “From the earliest times, the Church has venerated the memory of the departed and offered supplications, especially the Eucharistic sacrifice, for them, so that they might be purified and attain the beatific vision of God. The Church also recommends almsgiving, indulgences, and penitential works for the deceased,” the catechism adds in the next paragraph.

If, at the moment of death, a person has light sins that he has not repented of or atoned for the temporal punishments for sins, he enters purgatory: “By purgatory, we understand the process in which the soul is purified to be able to look to God; in this lies eternal bliss. Since the consequences of original sin mark us, most people die in need of this purification.”

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Catholics may encounter the objection that purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible.

Although the Holy Scripture does not directly mention purgatory, according to Ziolkovsky, we nevertheless find already in the Old Testament that souls who have died in sin need purification. The prayer of the living can help them to do this. Jude the Maccabean ordered a propitiatory sacrifice to be made for the dead so that they would be freed from sin (2 Mach 12:46).

“The Church took up the doctrine of the provisional ‘prison’ of the dead, and from this evolved the doctrine of purgatory. We find this belief in many Church Fathers, such as Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Cyprian,” Ziolkovsky continues. This doctrine was later given a universally accepted and visible form in commemorating all the faithful departed, which has been celebrated in the Church for about a thousand years.

According to Ziolkovsky, the belief in purgatory also has its universal justification since, in other cultures and religions, there is also the belief that man dies in the moral failings that he has not atoned for on earth and the belief that there is a way for this to happen.

“To reject the Catholic doctrine of purgatory would require us to admit reincarnation, which effectively solves the same problem, or to admit that hell does not exist – and if it does, then only temporarily. The Church has rejected This theory of apocatastasis,” Ziolkovsky writes. The idea that evil will not be punished contradicts the human desire for justice.

Catholics, therefore, pray for their dead at every Mass.

Greek Catholics.
The Greek Catholic Church also prayed for the deceased from the earliest times.

“Those who have died are remembered at every Divine Liturgy. In addition, prayers for the deceased are part of the daily services every Saturday, especially during Saturdays of Obsequies. Memorial services are held at funerals at fixed intervals, for example, on the third or fortieth day after death or the anniversary of death. In this way, we emphasize that the dead in Christ are still part of his body and that we are still bound to them by the bond of mutual love. Suppose we have been joined to his body and maintain ourselves as temples of his Spirit. In that case, this relationship lasts beyond the grave, which is why we continue to pray for one another in faith,” explains the editor of the World of Christianity and Greek-Catholic priest John Krupa.

Krupa points out that prayer for the dead recognizes that those who have died in faith continue to move forward toward God. And that is why we pray for the forgiveness of the sins of the dead: “But we know that these prayers no longer reach a person without the Spirit.”

According to a Greek Catholic priest, the prayers of the righteous cannot save those who have turned away from God. We pray for the righteous to be forgiven of their sins because “the righteous falls seven times a day” – everyone sins, even if only in small ways.

“So when we pray for the departed, we pray that the Lord will bring to full union with him those who are his own. We know that this is his desire and promise, so our prayers do not change his attitude, but confirm it,” concludes John Krupa.

Evangelicals: the human soul is in God’s hands after the death of man
Contrary to Catholic doctrine, Protestant churches do not believe in purgatory. According to the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Slovakia (ECAV), the human soul is in God’s hands after death.

“God the Father created it, put it into a human body, and after death calls it to Himself again. Jesus Christ is the one who purifies it before God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who enables it not to be lost in the world, but to remain in constant communion with its originator – God,” explains evangelical pastor Stefan Kiss for the World of Christianity.

“At the last farewell to the deceased, the priest liturgically hands him over into God’s hands, and what happens to the soul next can no longer be influenced in any way,” the evangelical clergyman adds.

Thus, unlike Catholics, Evangelicals no longer try to help the deceased with prayers or influence God in how He deals with the soul. Evangelicals’ prayers for the dead are merely remembering them, thanking God for the person’s life, and professing faith that God will deal mercifully and kindly with the deceased.

“Part of these prayers is a plea for the continued strengthening of the faith of the bereaved so that one day all may meet again,”

According to him, the Evangelical Church does not even know the doctrine of purgatory and reiterates that the deceased are solely in the hands of God. The object of all prayers and acts of worship, including the funeral farewell itself, are the living, who are to be comforted and for whose strength of faith we must always ask. According to Stephen Kiss, we do not know precisely what happens to the soul after death, but we know from hints in the Bible that the soul goes to or from God.

“Scripture does speak of the last day and that then God will judge the living and the dead, but on the other hand, Scripture does not speak of the dead being subject to a time where they wait for that day. So if we consider time as a quantity here but not there, we get a vague idea of what might be going on,”

The implication, according to the evangelical clergyman, is that even the last day and the last judgment in terms of eternity can take place for every person as they pass through the gates of death.

“That other day, from the point of view of our time, can occur for everyone at another time, and from the point of view of eternity, it is once – and that is when a person leaves this world. If we wanted to say that the dead are somewhere waiting for the Last Judgment, which will begin on such and such a day in such and such a year, we would be raping eternity and squeezing it into our reality, and we must not do that. Eternity trumps temporality, not the other way around. That is why we believe that eternity operates completely independently of our time; under God’s guidance, God can usher each person into eternal glory immediately after their death,” the evangelical priest states.

The Orthodox believe in air toll booths.
The Orthodox Church proclaims that a person’s soul must pass through the so-called air tolls or customs after death.

“These are a kind of spiritual passages through which the soul must pass after the death of the body and which are localized in the earth’s atmosphere. This doctrine comes from several revelations that the Orthodox saints had. At each customs house, the soul is ‘cleared’; two besi (demons) try to hold the soul back from its ascent to heaven. They search it to see if they can find something of their own in the soul. If the besos successfully contain the soul, they drag it down to the underworld. If the soul passes through all the customs, it can arrive in paradise,” explains the Czech Orthodox weblog Ambon.

The portal says that a person’s soul, after death, stands at these customs in the face of various passions. At the same time, one sees the demons of these passions in all their horror at the customs house.

“At that moment, something significant happens. The soul stands before the passion and can be swept away by it because it sees something that is its own, something that it has lived with during its earthly life, something that it has nourished, something that it has longed for, something that it has not fought against but, on the contrary, has cultivated. Then, naturally, the soul connects with this demonic spirit,” the Ambon portal adds.

The Orthodox believe that the soul that wanders through the tollhouses can be helped by the faithful on earth with prayers. “That is why the Church prays fervently for them during their post-mortem wanderings,” the Ambon portal writes. It also stresses that these prayers have nothing to do with indulgences.

“Through prayers, fasting, virtues, and good deeds, we help the deceased by being in the Church, in one body,” the text on the Czech Orthodox portal concludes.