A stained glass window in Grenoble city, France depicting St Lawrence before Emperor Valerian.

Although the feast of Lawrence of Rome is celebrated on August 10, the day he is said to have been executed on orders ultimately originating from Emperor Valerian, by today’s date, August 7, St Lawrence had already figured he had no more than three days to live

The way he spent those three days, in the year 258, the studied nonchalance with which he addressed his persecutor, the satirical, subversive humour, disguised as naivety, with which he complied with the imperial State’s wishes... these have become the stuff of legend.

Through the ages, St Lawrence has remained a favourite, a model of savoir-vivre, with the citizens of Rome, long-term admirers of sprezzatura in the face of arbitrary politicians.

To those of us interested in the discussion of what kind of voice the Church should have in a secularised society, the voice of St Lawrence is an attractive one. It speaks through his legend to strip us of some of our own myths.

But first, back to those final three days. By August 7, St Lawrence knew what was coming because, the day before, Pope St Sixtus II – the man who had brought St Lawrence to Rome with him and, barely 11 months before, appointed the young man to the important office of archdeacon of the city – had been summarily beheaded, together with six deacons.

According to tradition, the prefect of Rome then sent for St Lawrence, who was in charge of administering the material wealth of the Church. The prefect, citing the injunction to give unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s (and, no doubt, congratulating himself on his wit) ordered St Lawrence to hand over the treasures of the Church.

St Lawrence asked for three days, which he was given, to gather the treasures together and compile an inventory. The following days were spent distributing the material goods of the Church to the poor and the needy (for whom, as archdeacon, he was also responsible).

Then, on the appointed day, he met the prefect and presented him with the treasures of the Church: a group of people, said to have been carefully seated in rows, made up of the poor, the sick, the maimed, and – St Lawrence presenting them with a flourish as the crown jewels of the Church – widows and consecrated virgins.

Some historians doubt whether the prefect really did punish St Lawrence by roasting him over a gridiron – given that imperial orders were for summary beheadings (all it takes is a scribe’s error with a single letter of the alphabet for the execution to have become, in Latin, a ‘roasting’). The explanation traditionally given for the exceptionally slow death is that the prefect was so enraged with St Lawrence’s calculated performance that he vowed to make him taste death “inch by inch”.

In any case, there is some reason to doubt whether St Lawrence, twinkling with humour and infuriating to the end, ever really had the opportunity to tell his executioners, as the fires licked him: “I think you can turn me over. This side’s done.”

However, even if it were untrue, that legend is authentic in another sense. It perfectly captures the spirit with which he presented “the treasures of the Church” to the officer of imperial Rome.

Although we do not know much about St Lawrence, we do know that he had been a student at one of the leading centres of learning in Spain and, given that he was appointed the Church’s financial administrator by a man who knew him well, he must have had some reputation for practical acumen.

Therefore, the man who faced the prefect was no naïf. He should not be confused with some of the other worldly clergymen of our day, wringing their hands and uttering gnomic thoughts which could have come straight out of Chinese crackers or a soap opera ending.

A Christian understanding of secularisation cannot be obsessed with relations to worldly power

Indeed, no gesture of his was removed from practical affairs. The urgency with which he redistributed the Church’s goods made perfect rational sense in a context in which the Church leadership was being, literally, decapitated. (Other orders were issued that year for the confiscation of wealth of Christians in high positions of Roman administration.)

He was not just being ‘poetic’ in offering the sick and the maimed as among the treasures of the Church. Christians were at the time renowned as the people you could bank on not to flee the city when an epidemic struck. They stuck around and organised the care of the sick. The Church had many recruits as a result of this: partly a matter of some people thinking they were buying a health insurance policy, partly a matter of indebtedness but also partly a matter of conversion to a new vision of thinking of human brotherhood.

As for St Lawrence boasting about the widows and virgins... he was being much more subversive than we might at first think. Letters between mothers and daughters dating from that time show that some mothers actively encouraged their daughters to embrace consecrated virginity – an option made respectable by the Church – as an escape from the stifling confines of patriarchal marriage.

Virgins were women with an identity in their own right, just like widows. Within the Church, at least at the time, they found the space within which they could develop within a creative countercultural movement. The network of women was important for the success of the early Church, not least in the redistribution of material goods. They really were a treasure.

So, St Lawrence never lied to the prefect. He mocked him but that was by mocking the very edifice of values the prefect served.

This might seem a long time away from our age but in some ways it’s closer than the Malta of the mid-20th century. In the Rome of St Lawrence, the Church was not yet established. It was separate from the State and its gods.

Indeed, the persecution ordered by Valerian was in retaliation against Christians who refused to include the State’s gods in their worship. In our contemporary sense of the term ‘secularisation’ – the separation of religion from the apparatus of the State – St Lawrence was a secularist.

But, in another sense, he shows just how mistaken those Church leaders are who adopt, as their own, a definition of ‘secularisation’ that is used by social scientists.

The latter can only explore ‘secularisation’ in terms of worldly power – since the patterns of power are the essential subject of their chosen academic discipline. The Church, however, has other interests; a Christian understanding of secularisation cannot be obsessed with relations to worldly power.

St Lawrence’s last days show us something of what a Christian understanding of secularisation should look like.

Secularisation takes place when the human person ceases to be considered sacred, when human dignity depends entirely on social status. The early Church sacralised the person by insisting on human rights, which belonged to an individual independently of age, gender, infirmity or social structure.

Secularisation also takes place when any sense of sacred co-responsibility for common goods ceases to exist, where forms of co-stewardship of property – including Church properties – become unimaginable or ‘unrealistic’. The secularisation of the body and property is nothing less than the secularisation of being and having.

It is this secularisation that St Lawrence challenged in his final days. He married a magical realism with satire of the social order and a lightness of touch that no Church TV or communications strategy will ever manage unless it knows what it believes in the first place.

ranierfsadni@europe.com