J
jimmy
Guest
You missed the whole point of my post. You portrayed purgatory as a logically necessary consequence of praying for the dead. That is purely false, and the fact that certain saints had other ideas for why the Church prays for the dead shows how false it is.Why didn’t the Fathers teach that infants can be prayed out of limbo (theorized as the highest, painless level of hell) or hell (for those that didn’t teach limbo)? You might find some people on the fringe that teach what you have said but, that is far and few in between. Read the councils that dealt with Purgatory.
Purgatory follows from the concept of retributive justice. In other words, some sins must punished. This is a western concept, and it in no way follows from prayers for the dead. It is a seperate and independant premise.