Annotatio CLXIII
(The printed text misnumbers this annotation CLVIII; it is corrected here to CLXIII, its proper place in the sequence — it stands between CLXII above and CLXIIII below.)
”All the fat ones of the earth have eaten and adored.” — Psalm 21:30
Strabus [Walafrid Strabo], in the gloss to the exposition of this little verse, brings a sentence under the title of Augustine, thus:1 “Let not the dispenser prohibit the fat ones of the earth to eat at the table of the Lord, but let him warn [them] to fear the exactor.” Gratian, De consecratione, distinction 2, cites these same words from an unnamed and uncertain passage of Augustine, and from these gathers that sinners are not [to be excluded] from the communion of the Lord’s table. St. Thomas, in the third volume of the Summa, question 80, indicates that this sentence is not to be understood of public sinners, living in open crime, but of hidden and latent ones. For to those [public sinners], however earnestly demanding, he judges the sacrament of the Eucharist is not to be granted;2 but to these [secret ones] he indicates it is not to be denied in public. Yet he desires that the minister of the Sacrament, if perhaps he be conscious of their crime, should dissuade them — by some hidden kind of admonition — from the reception of the Lord’s body.