Here the agreement is wider than the dispute, and naming it first keeps the question honest. Catholics and Orthodox both pray for the dead, and both confess that the saved who die imperfectly purified undergo a real purification before they enter the joy of God. That is ancient, apostolic, and common ground — it is not what divides.

What the Orthodox reject is the developed Latin articulation. Specifically, they resist (a) the notion of purgatory as a distinct place; (b) the category of satisfactory or expiatory punishment — the “temporal punishment due to sin” that must be discharged; and (c) the scholastic framing and the indulgence apparatus built around it. For the Orthodox the after-death state is healing and growth in communion, not the serving-out of a sentence. At the Council of Florence the Greeks accepted a careful statement on purification and the value of prayer for the dead, but would not accept the Latin language of “fire” and punishment — and even that fragile agreement was repudiated in the East soon after.

And the striking thing is how much of the Catholic teaching is the shared patristic inheritance rather than a Latin addition. The Church’s defined teaching is the purification itself, not any particular imagery. The Catechism is careful: it calls purgatory the “final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned” — not a lesser hell — and presents the “cleansing fire” as how the tradition speaks by reference to Scripture, not as a defined place or flame. The doctrine rests on the same texts the Orthodox engage: 2 Maccabees 12, where it is “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead”; 1 Corinthians 3, where a man is “saved, yet so as by fire.”

So the honest map is this. The substance — purification after death, and prayer for the departed — is shared. The genuine difference is the framing: the Latin category of temporal punishment and satisfaction, with the indulgence system, is a Western development the Orthodox do not hold, and a Catholic should not pretend it is merely verbal. (One caution the other way: the Eastern “toll-houses” are a disputed folk-tradition, not the Orthodox equivalent of purgatory, and should not be used to caricature their belief.) Lead with the shared purification, not with images of flames, and the gap is far smaller than the word suggests.