Seeing God | Fr. Ephrem Reese, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was given on September 25, 2020 as part of the Thomistic Institute's East Coast Intellectual Retreat.

For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org

About the Speaker:

Fr. Ephrem Reese, O.P., was born in Harrisburg, PA. He received a B.A. from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD in 2010, and was confirmed in the Catholic Church around the same time. He entered the Order of Preachers in the summer of 2013. In the spring of 2020 he was ordained a priest, and received an S.T.L. from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Seeing God. To begin, I want to offer you a kind of coat hook for contemplation.
0:12.0	So you might leave this retreat with a lot of questions about what contemplation really means, how it works. But the fact that it matters, even the fact that it is
0:25.4	what you were made to do, that much I can prove to you. Defe dee. So you can hang your spiritual
0:34.7	coat on this. St. Thomas Aquinas was canonized by John the 22nd,
0:41.5	who was Pope from 1316 to 1334.
0:46.2	And this Pope is well known for having held that when the saints die,
0:50.5	they do not receive the beatific vision of the face of God.
0:57.1	They have to wait until the last judgment for the beatific vision. So this prompted John's successor, Pope Benedict XVI, to
1:07.1	issue an important bull entitled Benedictus Deus.
1:18.8	And in this constitution, which Benedict writes is to remain in force forever,
1:27.0	the teaching is defined that the souls of all the saints who have departed this life do attain to beatitude. And Benedict goes on to explain what this
1:29.8	means. He says, the saints, quote, have seen and do see the divine essence with an intuitive
1:37.8	vision and even face to face without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision. Rather, the divine essence
1:47.5	immediately manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly, and openly. And in this vision, they enjoy the divine essence.
1:57.0	Moreover, by this vision and enjoyment, the souls of those who have already died are
2:02.2	truly blessed and have eternal life and rest. Also, the souls of those who will die in the future
2:09.7	will see the same divine essence and will enjoy it before the general judgment. Such a vision and
2:16.4	enjoyment of the divine essence do away with the acts of faith and hope
2:21.1	in these souls, inasmuch as faith and hope are properly theological virtues. And after such
2:28.9	intuitive and face-to-face vision and enjoyment has or will have begun for these souls. The same vision
2:36.3	and enjoyment has continued and will continue without any interruption and without end until the
2:42.7	last judgment and from then on forever. So John the 22nd's early teaching was thoroughly refuted.
	...

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