Join me today to meet the joking martyr who handed over the treasures of the Church in Rome.
Name: Lawrence, Laurentius
Life: died 258 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: August 10
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After the sixth execution it was late in the day and the Praefectus Urbanus, the Prefect of the city of Rome who was the Emperor Valerian’s representative there while the emperor was away on campaign, had an idea. He called up the last prisoner remaining. The man was only a deacon, but the word was that he had been in charge of logistics. He was just the man the prefect wanted to see.
The Prefect of Rome realized that the Church had money. At least it had some money - not as much as pagan temples did of course. But there had been talk of silver chalices and golden candlesticks. Of course these precious things were carefully hidden away in moments of persecution like this one. And so the prefect made the deacon an offer.
The prefect explained the deacon’s situation. The deacon was condemned to die, along with all those who had taken Holy Orders in the Church. But perhaps an exception could be made for him. It wasn’t that the prefect was asking for a bribe - nothing so crass. He also wasn’t trying to steal the treasures of the Church. But if the deacon were to voluntarily gather up all those treasures and donate them to, let us say, the Roman war effort, then the prefect might be willing to let the deacon scurry away alive.
The deacon thought about it. The prefect had just executed all the other leaders of the Church in Rome, so there was no one else for the deacon to ask. Finally, the deacon agreed. In three days, he would find and gather the great treasures of the Church and hand them over in exchange for his life.
The edict calling for the death of bishops, priests and deacons was only a few months old. When the Emperor Valerian had come to power the Church had prospered. But as time passed, Valerian fell under the influence of one of his officers, the occultist Fulvius Macrianus. Macrianus made the case that the Christians were responsible for the chaos, plague, war and economic turmoil that we remember as the Crisis of the Third Century. By 257, Valerian was convinced, and a new persecution of Christians began. The first imperial edict seemed fairly mild. Valerian had simply stripped the Christians of some of their abilities to assemble in public and tried to send some clergy into exile. And in addition to this, Valerian had forbidden Christians from going into tombs.
This last restriction was especially important in the city of Rome. For a long time, the Church had literally existed underground. Long before there was a Church, as the city of Rome prospered, stone for new buildings had been quarried nearby. Then the expanding city had covered the excavated areas. The early Christians had expanded on these excavations, digging connecting tunnels and creating an underground maze beneath the city.
One reason that the early Church had dug the tunnels that became known as the catacombs was because of the way that Christians understood death. Pagans considered dead bodies to be ritually impure, and did not like being around them. The Church saw things differently. Jesus had described the dead as sleepers, and the Church recognized that on the last day they would awake. Besides, many of the dead were martyrs, and it was a privilege to be among the relics of these great men and women. And so the Christians had built rooms for the sleepers that they named after a Greek word for bedroom, koimeterion, the ancestor of our word ‘cemetery’. The faithful departed were placed into small openings carved into the sides of these koimeteria. Soon Christians added addition tunnels and staircases and the resting places for the dead became refuges for the living as well. Christians could hold Mass below ground, surrounded by their beloved martyrs, fairly safe in the knowledge that pagans would be reluctant to come down after them. Even if soldiers tried to catch them, the catacombs were soon so complex that Christians could slip away by secret tunnels. By forbidding Christians from worshipping in tombs, the Emperor Valerian was trying to cut Christians off from one of the advantages they had long held.
But even so, the Church was ready for this level of persecution. Things had been worse before. The authorities were reluctant to seriously police Christian assemblies, so laymen mostly kept doing what they had been doing. Some priests and bishops went into exile but kept in touch with their dioceses by letters.
Valerian and his advisor Macrianus were not amused. The next year, Valerian released a second edict. Now that the Church was out in the open, fully exposed, he was going to remove its leadership. All bishops, priests and deacons were sentenced to die immediately. The economy was in shambles, so Valerian adapted the persecution of Christians to help with that as well. Nobles and wealthy people who were Christians should be stripped of their wealth. Laymen would still not be allowed to assemble, and the punishment for doing so would be much harsher.
At this point, there was no longer any reason for faithful Christians to avoid the catacombs. The gentle Pope Sixtus II, only in the first year of his papacy, had hoped to keep out of sight by moving to one of the lesser known catacombs, the cemetery of Praetextatus. But the pope could hardly hope to avoid notice for long. Pope Sixtus II was sitting in his papal chair speaking to his frightened people when soldiers burst in. Since it was illegal to be assembled, some laymen tried to stop the soldiers at the door figuring that they were in trouble anyway. Sixtus, however, was not going to allow anyone to be martyred in his place, and purposely drew the attention of the soldiers. They dragged the pope from Saint Peter’s chair and rounded up four of his deacons. Pope Sixtus II and his four deacons were martyred that day. By nightfall another two deacons had been found and martyred. That morning there had been seven deacons in Rome. Now one remained. His name was Lawrence, and soon he too was brought before the Prefect of the City.
The prefect offered Deacon Lawrence a way out, and the deacon agreed. Deacon Lawrence promised to bring the treasures of the Church to the prefect in three days. Now strictly speaking, such an offer went against the letter of the emperor’s edict. But the prefect could read between the lines, and see that as much as the emperor hated Christians, he was also desperate for money. Getting Lawrence to give up the treasures of the Church would be worth leaving one deacon alive. It might even start a wave of deacon-extortions. The emperor would be pleased.
By the 10th of August, the three days had passed, and Deacon Lawrence sent word to the prefect that he had assembled the treasures, as requested. The prefect arrived, eager to see the haul. To his surprise he could hardly get there without pushing through a crowd of poor, dirty, sick people, the riff raff of the city.
When the prefect finally got to Lawrence, he demanded to know what was going on. Where was the gold and silver? And what were all these sick and poor people doing here? Deacon Lawrence pretended not to understand. The prefect had asked for the treasures of the Church. These people were the treasures of the Church. Yes, there had been some gold and silver. But God had become man and died for the poor and destitute. God had promised that those who helped them might glimpse His face.
When the prefect realized what Deacon Lawrence was saying he exploded in anger. The poet Prudentius, who presents our earliest complete account of what happened, puts these words in the sputtering official’s mouth:
You wretched low-life! Do you think
That all this mummery you’re staging
Will get you off? That comedy
Negates your promise, sets you free?And did you think it a rare joke
To practice with your wit on me?
That I’m a subject fit for laughter,
The butt your audience is after? (Len Krisak translation)
In truth, Deacon Lawrence had never planned to escape. Tradition has it that after the chaos of the raid in the catacombs, Lawrence had briefly spoken with the captive Pope Sixtus II, who had told Lawrence that they would meet again in four days time. So Lawrence had used the four days he had. He had taken the gold and the silver that was left and given it to the poor. And he had asked them whether they would stand with him as silent witnesses when the day of his martyrdom arrived. What Lawrence was asking them to do was not exactly illegal since they would not be assembling as Christians. But it can’t have been lost on the people he was asking that they might be beaten or rounded up on charges of general troublemaking. Despite these dangers, they had come.
After the prefect had shouted himself hoarse - I only quoted two of the eleven verses of furious bile that Prudentius attributes to him - the prefect set about figuring out what to do with Deacon Lawrence. An example would be made of him. Did Lawrence think he was funny? Well the prefect knew that he who laughs last, laughs best.
Pope Sixtus II and the other six deacons had probably been beheaded. But for Lawrence, that wasn’t enough. The prefect finally came up with the idea of roasting Lawrence. He wasn’t going to burn him - even that would be too quick. He would put Lawrence on a gridiron over hot coals and slowly roast the deacon to death.
This was the kind of extravagant cruelty that was designed to make an impression on those who watched. People crowded in and around the building where the execution was to be held to see whether the Christian would break down and beg at the end. But as the room filled with the smell of roasting meat, Deacon Lawrence lay on the gridiron without a word. Finally, after a long time, he did speak. Looking at the prefect, Lawrence said:
“Turn me over, I’m done on this side.” (my translation)
Then Lawrence added that since the prefect had been so eager to grill him, he should try a piece, see if Lawrence was cooked to his taste. Or perhaps the prefect preferred his meat raw?
The whole point of the barbaric punishment had been to make Deacon Lawrence a pathetic, begging shadow of what he had been. It hadn’t worked. Educated Romans would have recalled that a long time ago, something similar had taken place. Back then an Etruscan king had come to conquer the little town of Rome, and a single Roman warrior, Mucius Scaevola, had gone to try to find the king in his tent and assassinate him. The would-be assassin had been caught. But when he was brought before the king, Scaevola had stuck his own hand into a flame and locked eyes with the king as his hand burned away. Scaevola had told the king that Rome was full of men like him, and the would-be invader had decided to go and make war on someone else. Today, it was Deacon Lawrence who was an heir to Mucius Scaevola. The prefect of the city seemed more like the Etruscan king, a barbarian, a point Lawrence drove home by wondering if the prefect was going to have a cannibalistic snack. That moment of defiance became the story, and it spread out from Rome to other Christian communities, encouraging others to imitate the deacon’s unbreakable spirit.
It is such a good story that Saint Lawrence’s moment of defiance is often presented as the saint’s last words. But that’s not the way the poet Prudentius tells the story. The detail that Prudentius adds can help us understand why Saint Lawrence became such a beloved saint, beloved of Romans as you might expect, claimed as a patron by the poor of course, but also claimed by people with pretty tenuous links to his story, like cooks and comedians.
Prudentius doesn’t just present Saint Lawrence dying in defiance. He shows him dying in hope. Deacon Lawrence was the last representative of the Church in Rome. As of that day, the churches of Rome were flat broke: everything had been given away. We might expect to find Lawrence hoping for a slow recovery, that maybe the future would have a little bit of what there was in the past. That’s not what we find.
According to Prudentius, after defying the prefect, Deacon Lawrence began to pray. He prayed for the eternal city of Rome as it tumbled through the Crisis of the Third Century. He asked for the prayers of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, both martyred in the city where he was about to die. He asked that their prayers would banish Rome’s old gods and turn the city toward Christ. And then Lawrence prayed for the nations who had bowed the knee to Rome, that they would bow the knee to Christ too. Lawrence wasn’t thinking about a slow, partial recovery. He was looking forward to complete triumph, total vindication, to a Christian world. These were prayers of hope and faith for a Church which would grow not just in spite of the cruelty of the Roman prefect, but because of it.
Prudentius, writing a century and a half later, knew that this triumph was on the way. The emperor Valerian was headed for his fateful defeat by Shapur I, the Persian king of kings, who would make Valerian his living footstool. Soon after that, the ambitions of the occultist Macrianus would end in humiliation and defeat. Saint Lawrence had been right about the true treasures of the Church - with those treasures secured, it did not take the church in Rome long to replenish the supplies that Saint Lawrence had given away. Across the Empire, the Church would grow, renewed, from the blood of the martyrs. And it had started on that day, in that smoky room. The way Prudentius saw it, the encounter of the joking martyr and the furious prefect was the first domino to fall, the beginning of the end of pagan Rome.
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