Deacon of the Roman church The Treasures of the Church

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.