Today, 10 August, the Church keeps Saint Lawrence, deacon of the Church of Rome, martyred in 258. He is one of very few non-apostolic martyrs the Church honours with the rank of feast — above an ordinary memorial — and the only one whose line nearly every Catholic can repeat, often without knowing it is his. Here is his story, what the documents carry, what tradition added, and the prayer of his Mass in Latin and English.
Rome, 258: a bloody August
The emperor Valerian issued two edicts against Christians in 257 and 258. The second was surgical: bishops, priests and deacons were to be killed at once; Christian senators and knights lost property and rank. The target was not the crowd — it was the structure, and above all the money the Church administered for the poor.
On 6 August 258 Pope Sixtus II was surprised celebrating in the catacomb of Saint Callixtus and beheaded on the spot with several of his deacons. Lawrence was the archdeacon — first of the seven deacons of Rome, responsible for the Church's goods and the care of the poor. He outlived the pope by four days.
“These are the treasures of the Church”
The prefect of Rome summoned him with a simple demand: hand over the riches of the Christian community. Lawrence asked for three days to gather them.
He used the three days to distribute to the poor everything the Church had. On the third day he presented himself before the prefect bringing with him the beggars, the crippled, the blind, the widows and the orphans the Church supported, and said the line that has carried seventeen centuries:
“These are the treasures of the Church.”
It was not a rhetorical dare. It was doctrine. Lawrence was stating, in front of Roman power, what the Church still says about the nature of her goods: they are not hers, they belong to the poor, and she is only the steward.
The martyrdom of Lawrence on 10 August 258, his office as deacon and his burial on the Via Tiburtina are attested very early — the Depositio Martyrum of 354 already gives the date, and Pope Damasus set up an inscription for him in the fourth century.
Saint Ambrose (c. 340–397) already tells of the poor presented as treasures, and Prudentius, shortly after, sings the martyrdom.
And the gridiron has been with him from the start: it appears in the earliest Christian art, it is fixed in the Roman liturgy, and it is what makes him recognisable at a glance in any church in the world.
The gridiron, and the impossible line
The prefect, humiliated in front of his own men, ordered him killed slowly: an iron bed over coals. And Lawrence, after a while, said to his executioner:
“Assum est, versa et manduca. — This side is done; turn me over and eat.”
It is the only recorded joke made by a man under execution, and the Church kept it deliberately. Not because the suffering was small, but because it says something true about martyrdom: a man who has already given his life has nothing left for his killer to take. Lawrence's humour is the most disarmed way possible of saying that the fear is gone.
Why a feast, and not a memorial
In the Church's calendar 10 August is a feast — a rank that among saints is kept almost entirely for apostles and evangelists. Lawrence is the exception Rome would never give up.
- He belonged to the Church of Rome. Deacon of the Pope's own city, killed alongside the Pope, in the persecution meant to behead the Roman Church.
- The cult is immediate and enormous. Constantine raised a basilica over his tomb; Saint Lawrence outside the Walls is one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome.
- He had a vigil and an octave. Few saints ever did; it was the mark of highest honour.
- He defines the diaconate. Everything the Church asks of a deacon — to serve at table, to care for the poor, to hold goods without clinging to them — is in him in finished form.
Every August the Earth crosses the dust of comet Swift–Tuttle and the sky fills with shooting stars: the Perseids, peaking around 10 to 12 August.
In Italy they have been called for centuries Lacrime di San Lorenzo — the tears of Saint Lawrence, sparks from his gridiron falling out of the sky on the night of his feast. It is astronomy with a name out of the martyrology, and perhaps no image is better: the whole world, once a year, covered in sparks.
The prayer of his Mass
The Collect makes the only request that makes sense before a man burned alive — and makes it with the kind of wordplay Roman liturgy never lost its taste for: that God put out in us the flames of our vices, he who gave Lawrence to overcome the flames of his torment.
Da nobis, quæsumus, omnípotens Deus: vitiórum nostrórum flammas exstínguere; qui beáto Lauréntio tribuísti tormentórum suórum incéndia superáre. Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum.
Grant us, we beseech you, almighty God, to quench the flames of our vices, who gave blessed Lawrence to overcome the fires of his torments. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
And this is the antiphon of his Office, which puts a whole life into one sentence:
Levíta Lauréntius bonum opus operátus est: qui per signum crucis cæcos illuminávit, et thesáuros Ecclésiae dedit paupéribus.
Lawrence the levite did a good work: by the sign of the cross he gave sight to the blind, and he gave the treasures of the Church to the poor.
Amen.
Sancte Laurenti, ora pro nobis. Saint Lawrence, pray for us — and teach us to look at the poor and recognise, with no irony at all, that what we hold most precious is kept there.
- Saint Dominic de Guzmán — another who sold what he had to feed the hungry.
- Saint John Mary Vianney — the Curé of Ars, patron of parish priests.
- Words of the saints — a growing collection, in English and Portuguese.
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