Two separate practices get bundled here and they have different fates. Asking a saint to pray for you is universal in Catholic, Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox life, and the defence is always the same: it is what you do when you ask a living friend to pray, extended to friends who have died, because the dead in Christ are not less alive. Praying for the dead is equally universal in those churches, and is recorded on Christian gravestones from the second century. Purgatory is the specifically Latin theory of a purifying state after death, developed through the Middle Ages, defined at Florence and Trent, and inseparable in the popular mind from the indulgence trade that lit the Reformation. The Orthodox reject purgatory as a doctrine while praying for the departed at every liturgy, offering koliva at memorials, and keeping Saturdays of the Souls, which is a position Western observers routinely mistake for inconsistency. Protestants cut the theory and the practice together, and in most Protestant funerals the dead are addressed only in the third person.