Lawrence was archdeacon of the church of Rome under Sixtus the Second. The office was not honorary. The deacons of Rome held the alms of the city: the money and goods given for the widows, the orphans, the prisoners, the sick, and the poor of a congregation that had grown large. The archdeacon kept the register and the chest, and knew, name by name, who in Rome was eating because the Church fed them.

In the summer of the year two hundred and fifty eight the Emperor Valerian published a second edict against the Christians, aimed at the clergy and at the property. Bishops, presbyters and deacons were to be executed at once, and the goods of the Church were to be confiscated to the treasury. On the sixth of August the officers found Sixtus in the cemetery of Callistus, presiding at the liturgy, and killed him there with four of his deacons.

St. Ambrose, writing at Milan roughly a hundred and thirty years later, tells what Lawrence said when he saw his bishop led away: that he asked where the father was going without his son, and that Sixtus answered he was not being left behind, that a harder fight was reserved for him, and that he would follow in three days. Ambrose is our earliest witness for it. He is late, and he is a preacher rather than a reporter, and the whole later tradition depends on him.

The prefect of Rome wanted the money. The Church of Rome was known to be rich, and the edict had made the confiscation of its goods an object of the persecution rather than an accident of it. Lawrence, who held the chest, was ordered to produce the treasures of the Church.

He asked for three days, so the account runs, and used them to distribute everything to the poor. On the third day he came back to the prefect with a crowd behind him: the poor, the crippled, the blind, the widows, the orphans of the Roman church, whom the Church's money had been keeping alive. These, he said, are the treasures of the Church. Ambrose tells it as the reason he was killed with a particular cruelty rather than simply beheaded like his bishop.

The tradition says he was bound on a gridiron over a slow fire, and that he spoke from it. Prudentius, a century and a half after the event, made the scene famous in Latin verse, and the gridiron has been Lawrence's emblem in the art of East and West ever since.

Historians have raised a fair question about that. The edict of two hundred and fifty eight prescribed beheading for clergy, and Sixtus and his deacons were beheaded four days earlier under the same order. The fire may be the tradition's way of saying what his death meant rather than a record of how it was carried out. The Church has never made the gridiron an article of faith. What is not in question is the date, the office, the grave on the Tiburtine Way, and the answer about the treasures, which the Roman church remembered because it was the truest thing anyone said that year.

He was buried in the catacomb on the Via Tiburtina on the tenth of August, two hundred and fifty eight. Within seventy years the Emperor Constantine had raised a basilica over the grave, and it stands there still as San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, one of the great pilgrimage churches of Rome. His name entered the Roman canon of the Mass and never left it.

The Eastern Church keeps his memory on the tenth of August together with Sixtus, receiving him among the martyrs of the undivided Church, whose witness belongs to East and West in common because it was given before there was any division to belong to.

In the Orthodox tradition he is remembered above all for the answer, and the answer is not a piece of wit. The prefect and the deacon were using the same word for two different things, and the deacon was not making a joke about it. He was stating the Church's actual balance sheet.