Purgatory is for all those for whom the death of Christ was not enough to pay for all their sins. Thanks but I'll go with the Word of God and go straight to God's presence having been totally cleansed by the finished work of Christ on the cross.
This is waht happens when the Word of God is replaced with the ideas of men.
Interestingly this is also being debated/discussed for the last few days at http://www.freedominion.ca which is down at the moment but is under the topic of "Quebec Bishops.........."
The Word of God is not replaced by the word of men when Purgatory is at issue. Purgatory is indirectly mentioned in Scripture and rather bluntly alluded to by more than a few of the early Fathers, as several posters on this thread have demonstrated already.
You and several other non-Catholics act like people whistling past a graveyard on this topic. You won't address it head-on, you merely make an assertion that Purgatory is un-Christian and walk away from it.
Tell me, my friend, is Scripture itself the Word of God or the word of men? The correct answer is that it's the Word of God written by men under divine inspiration. In other words, it's a bit of both. So you are already on shaky ground when making bold sounding pronouncements about adhering only to the Word of God.
But why should you do even that? How do you *really* know that Scripture is the Word of God? Who said so? It didn't fall out of the sky ready-made. Indeed, the 27 books of the New Testament had many contemporary claimants around them for canonical status; the issue was by no means universally clear to early Christians.
It took several councils of the Church, from 382 to 419 AD, to truly ratify the canon we know today. Yet this in itself was the teaching of men was it not?
"No," you might say, if you were given to acknowledging plain history to this extent, "they were led by the Holy Spirit to arrive at their conclusions." Just so! These men, bishops of the Church, had therefore the authority to determine doctrine, which the contents of Scripture would be: a doctrinal teaching. If this be not so, then we are back to asking why we believe the Scriptures to be inspired over many other salutary, contemporary works, and we will not find a satisfactory answer. Blind faith, disconnected from any reason or historical context, would have to suffice as the only guide.
In a negative way, the same thing applies to this discussion of Purgatory. You cannot or will not acknowledge the Deposit of Faith contained oral Tradition which has been handed down from the Apostolic Era. Therfore, you dismiss Purgatory out-of-hand, even in the face of some Scriptural warrant and lots of early Christian practice and testimony. You deny the role of the bishops to determine doctrine from the Deposit of Faith, so their teaching means nothing to you. But, again, why does their teaching mean something to you, by default at least, when you acknowledge, wittingly or otherwise, their determnation of the canon of Scripture?
What's at issue here, in the final analysis, is authority. You don't seem to really acknowledge any. Therefore, your faith has a very shaky foundation, since it can have no real explanation to it.
The faith of the Church of the Apostolic Era and its immediate aftermath is quite well laid out in the collection of the writings of the Fathers of the Church, available for your perusal at any library. You will find that it dovetails with that of the Catholic Church today. It is your job to discern that, if the Faith has been wrong from virtually the beginning, it is a "false religion." Divine providence, and the explicit promises of Jesus Christ in Matthew 28:20, have failed, and we might as well give up our current folly as Christian believers. But if the faith of the early Church was not wrong back then, and is traceable through time without break down to our own day, and found to reside in the Catholic Faith, then you must accept the implications. Among them, Purgatory, despite your current protestations, is quite real. The same authority that gave you the Scriptures declares it so.