St. Lawrence the Archdeacon

Lawrence was archdeacon of the Roman church under Sixtus the Second. The office carried the alms of the city: the money and goods given for the widows, orphans, prisoners and poor of a large congregation, kept in a chest and a register that the archdeacon held.

In the summer of 258 Valerian's second edict ordered clergy executed on identification and the property of the Church confiscated. Sixtus was found presiding at the liturgy in the cemetery of Praetextatus on the sixth of August and killed there with four of his deacons. St. Ambrose, writing at Milan a century and a third later, gives the exchange between the bishop being led away and the deacon left behind, and the promise that he would follow in three days.

The prefect wanted the money. Lawrence, so the tradition runs, asked for three days, spent them distributing everything to the poor, and came back on the third day with a crowd of the crippled, the blind, the widowed and the orphaned of the Roman church behind him, and said that these were the treasures of the Church.

The tradition says he was bound on a gridiron over a slow fire and spoke from it, and the gridiron has been his emblem in East and West ever since. Historians note that the edict of 258 prescribed beheading for clergy and that Sixtus and his deacons were beheaded under it four days earlier, and that the fire may be the tradition's way of saying what the death meant. The Church has never made the manner of it an article of faith.

He was buried on the tenth of August, 258, in the catacomb on the Via Tiburtina. Constantine raised a basilica over the grave within seventy years, and it stands there still. The Eastern Church keeps his memory on the tenth of August with Sixtus, among the martyrs of the undivided Church.