Saint Lawrence

On a sweltering summer day in 258, under the fierce persecution of Emperor Valerian, in a public place of execution in the city of Rome, a gruesome scene was unfolding: a young man, stripped naked, was tied fast to a huge iron gridiron set over a bed of red-hot, smoldering coals. The heavy smell of burning flesh rose into the air.

Laurentius was born around 225 in Huesca, in the region of Aragon, Spain, a distant province of the Roman Empire, where the Christian community was still small and had to keep its faith quietly, among local pagan temples and Roman military posts scattered along the foot of the Pyrenees. He was an intelligent, devout young man from a devout Christian family. While studying theology in Zaragoza, he met a learned teacher, the priest Sixtus, a Greek by origin. The two formed a deep bond as master and disciple. When Father Sixtus moved to Rome to serve there, Lawrence followed him: a journey of thousands of kilometers across the Iberian Peninsula and over the Mediterranean Sea, no easy matter for a young provincial of that time, and a sign of how close the two were.

In August 258, Emperor Valerian issued a second and bloodier edict: all Christian bishops, priests and deacons were to be executed at once, and all the Church’s property confiscated. This edict was far harsher than the first wave of persecution just a year earlier, which had only forced Church leaders to sacrifice to the pagan gods or go into exile. This time the Roman authorities aimed to wipe out the entire clergy and the funds that kept the Church’s charitable work going, a sign of the court’s growing fear of the Christian community spreading in the heart of the empire. On August 6, 258, while celebrating the liturgy in secret in the underground Catacomb of Callixtus on the Appian Way, Pope Sixtus II and four deacons were seized by Roman soldiers who burst in, and beheaded on the spot. That same catacomb later became the burial place of many other Popes from the second to the fourth centuries, known as the “Crypt of the Popes”.

After killing the Pope, the prefect of Rome learned that Lawrence was the keeper of the Church’s treasury. He believed the Christians were hiding thousands of chalices of pure gold, oil vessels set with emeralds and huge chests of gold coins. He had Lawrence arrested and ordered:

“Hand over to the emperor all the treasure of your Church!”

Humiliated before all his officials, the prefect went mad with rage. He roared:

“How dare you mock me with beggars? Do you want a quick, glorious death by the sword? No! I will roast you slowly until you beg to hand over the gold!”

He ordered a special instrument of torture set up: a large iron gridiron over a bed of smoldering charcoal, to roast his body little by little, a cruelty rare even among the savage tortures of the Roman persecutions.

Constantine the Great later had the magnificent Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls (San Lorenzo fuori le Mura) built right over his tomb on the Via Tiburtina, one of the seven traditional great basilicas of Rome. That original fourth-century building was rebuilt and enlarged about two hundred years later, and to this day the remains of Saint Lawrence, together with Saint Stephen the Protomartyr, are kept in the crypt beneath the high altar of that basilica.