Why There Is No Purgatory

Orthodoxy prays for the departed and believes those prayers avail, and it has never taught a purgatory. The Latin doctrine supposes a place of temporal punishment where a debt of satisfaction still owing after forgiveness is paid off, and each of its parts is foreign to the Orthodox mind: that sin leaves a quantity of punishment to be discharged, that the discharge happens in a distinct place, and that its length can be reckoned or shortened by indulgence. Orthodoxy speaks instead of souls awaiting the Judgment in a foretaste of what is coming, helped by the prayers of the Church, and refuses to say more. St Mark of Ephesus argued exactly this at Florence and refused to sign.