Indeed. It may be, as I suspect, that the grand tour of the Apocalypse is not merely about future events, but rather a illumination of ongoing Processes, including the processes, patterns and stages of inner life, which includes of course how these inner conditions and changes impact the outer world. The book seems more like a user manual than mere list of predictions, although clearer discernment of inner processes and their impacts on the outer world does also lend to seeing clearer trajectories in outer events, increasing our capacity to predict things. These are not one-time events, but rather patterns that repeat as the conditions support them, which is perhaps why folks for millenia who try to apply the symbols and archetypes to specific literal one-time events are constantly mostly wrong.
Also, the history of Catholicism is quite full of rich diversity. Often ignored or misunderstood by protestant leaning beliefs are the contemplative and monastic orders and disciplines, such as Franciscan, Cistercian, Benedictine, etc.. These include folks who do not always fit the standard current mainstream Catholic codes in belief or practice about Purgatory or anything else.
Purgatory and the Apocalypse also reminds me of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo_Thodol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo
"In some schools of Buddhism, bardo (Classical Tibetan: བར་དོ་ Wylie: bar do) or antarābhava (Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese: 中有, romanized in Chinese as zhōng yǒu and in Japanese as chū'u)[1] is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth. The concept arose soon after Gautama Buddha's death, with a number of earlier Buddhist schools accepting the existence of such an intermediate state, while other schools rejected it. The concept of antarābhava, an intervening state between death and rebirth, was brought into Buddhism from the Vedic-Upanishadic (later Hindu) philosophical tradition.[2][3] Later Buddhism expanded the bardo concept to six or more states of consciousness covering every stage of life and death.[4] In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is the central theme of the Bardo Thodol (literally Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State), the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text intended to both guide the recently deceased person through the death bardo to gain a better rebirth and also to help their loved ones with the grieving process.[5]"
Wondering about life after death is like the unborn wondering about life after birth. We come out screaming bloody murder because it feels like dying, yet the scope and variety of life after birth is many many magnitudes more than life in the womb (like seed versus tree), and that great cloud of ancestral witnesses are like the nurses, midwives and relatives in the waiting room. And, while the personal ego may not survive death, it may be that other forms of life after death are overwhelmingly MORE (in both scope and variety) than what we are experiencing now. And, as with birth, where there is no guarantee a newborn lives to see its first birthday, or with sprouting seeds, where there is no guarantee it flowers, the newly dead are not immediately done with their growth. The potential of life without end is simply that. Thus, notions like Purgatory and the Bardo.