My wife and I have enjoyed a very special friendship here in our Christian Retirement Community with a lady who served for many years in East Africa as a nurse/midwife missionary with the PCA’s Mission to the World committee. She grew up as a “cradle catholic” (from childhood) and attended college and vocational post-graduate training in Roman Catholic institutions. She came to saving faith in Jesus (and left her Roman Catholic connections initially over the doctrine of transubstantiation) shortly before heading to the mission field, so did not have an opportunity to become well-grounded in evangelical Protestantism, let alone the Reformed faith. The daily demands of medical duties left very little time for in-depth Bible study.
Now in retirement, she has been experiencing the excitement of discovering biblical truths that had for some many decades elided her. In her Catholic university education, she had many courses in theology, but it had all been in classic Catholic doctrine, without a single course in Bibe content. In fact, none of her courses even used a Bible as a text, and she did not even own a Bible. Even after many years as a Protestant, one Catholic doctrine that had remained unexamined was that of purgatory. As so, years after leaving the Roman Catholic Church, she still had the idea of purgatory in her mind, even thinking that it made sense to her that before people could go to heaven, they ought to spend some time in purgatory “to get cleaned up!”