Lawrence of Rome

Lawrence of Rome (Latin: Laurentius) was a deacon of the Church of Rome and among the most celebrated martyrs of the third century. Almost nothing about his birth and youth can be established from sources close to his own time. A later tradition, widely repeated in medieval and early modern hagiography, held that he was born in Hispania, commonly at Osca (Huesca) in Hispania Tarraconensis, or less often at Valencia; his parents are sometimes named as Orentius and Patientia, themselves later culted as saints. These details do not appear in the fourth-century writers who first narrate his passion, and historians treat his Spanish origin as unverified. What is secure is his place in the Roman clergy under Pope Sixtus II, who reigned in 257–258. Lawrence was one of the seven deacons of Rome and, in the developed legend, the pope’s archdeacon, entrusted with the church’s treasury and with the daily distribution of alms to the city’s poor and sick.

The context of his death is the persecution launched by the Emperor Valerian. In 257 Valerian had already ordered clergy to sacrifice to the Roman gods and had forbidden Christian assemblies in cemeteries. A further rescript in 258 commanded that bishops, priests, and deacons be executed at once, and that Christian members of the senatorial and equestrian orders lose rank and property. On 6 August 258 Sixtus II was arrested in the cemetery of Praetextatus and beheaded, together with several deacons. Lawrence survived his bishop by only a few days. The Depositio martyrum, a Roman liturgical list compiled by 354, already assigns his burial to 10 August, which became and has remained his feast day.

The story of those intervening days was given classic form by Ambrose of Milan in the late fourth century and by Prudentius shortly afterward, and was taken up in the Liber Pontificalis and in countless later passions. According to this account, the civil authorities demanded that Lawrence produce the riches of the church. He requested a short interval, used it to give what remained to the needy, and then assembled the poor, the lame, and the blind and presented them to the prefect as the church’s true treasure. He was thereupon sentenced to death. The traditional manner of execution is roasting on an iron grid. Ambrose speaks of Lawrence’s triumph over fire; Prudentius describes the gridiron at length and attributes to the martyr the remark, after a time, that the cooks might turn him over, as he was done on one side. That jest and the gridiron itself became inseparable from his iconography. Modern scholarship has observed that Valerian’s edict specified capital punishment of a kind that in Rome ordinarily meant beheading for men of Lawrence’s station, and that the roasting narrative may be legendary; the existence of a deacon-martyr Lawrence, killed in the Valerian persecution and buried on the Via Tiburtina, is not in serious doubt.

He was laid in the cemetery of Cyriaca on the Via Tiburtina. Constantine I later sponsored a basilica at the tomb; the present Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, repeatedly rebuilt, stands on that site and houses his relics. It is one of the seven principal pilgrimage churches of Rome. Lawrence’s cult was already vigorous in the city by the mid-fourth century and spread throughout the Latin West and beyond. Numerous churches bear his name. He was not canonized by a later formal process; he belongs to the ancient martyrs whose public veneration predates the medieval procedures of beatification and canonization. In Christian devotion he is invoked as patron of the poor, of deacons, of cooks and others whose work involves fire or the gridiron, of comedians, of librarians and archivists, of students, and of many cities and countries, including Rome, Huesca, Rotterdam, Canada, and Sri Lanka. His emblem remains the gridiron, often together with the dalmatic of a deacon and the palm of martyrdom.