In the year 258, the Roman prefect summoned a deacon named Lawrence and gave him three days.
The Emperor Valerian had issued an edict targeting Catholic clergy. The Pope - Lawrence's bishop, Sixtus II - had already been executed. Now the prefect wanted the Church's treasures. Gold, silver, the wealth accumulated by the Christian community in Rome. Three days to gather it and hand it over. Lawrence agreed.
On the third day, Lawrence arrived at the prefect's office. He had gathered what he was asked to bring. Behind him came the sick, the lame, the blind, the poor who lived on the margins of Roman society. He presented them to the prefect and said: these are the Church's treasures.
He was executed on a gridiron - a metal grate placed over coals - the following day. The story records that he said to his executioners, partway through: turn me over. I'm done on this side.
August 10th is his feast.
Why this story belongs in your household
I am a permanent deacon in the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois. Lawrence is my patron - the patron of all deacons - and I have sat with his story for years. What strikes me most is not his courage in dying, though that is extraordinary. What strikes me is the precision of his wit.
He did not lie to the prefect. He did not hide the truth. He showed up with exactly what the prefect asked for and named what he brought with complete accuracy. These are the treasures. He was not being clever. He was being theologically exact. The Church's real wealth was not in its gold. It was in the people it was serving.
Every Catholic household with children should know this story. Not as a nice anecdote about a brave saint, but as a theological statement about what the Church is and what it is for. The Church is not primarily an institution with assets. It is the Body of Christ, and the poor are not its charity project. They are, in Lawrence's formulation, its treasures.
What does this mean at the kitchen table? It means that the way a family talks about the poor matters. Whether the marginalized people in your community are described as problems or as treasures shapes the formation of the children at the table in ways that no curriculum can undo. Lawrence said it in 258 and the Church agreed with him enough to make him a saint.
The tradition: grilled food on August 10th
I want to be honest with you about this tradition. It is a bit macabre, and it is also completely true and completely Catholic.
For centuries, the popular tradition on the feast of Saint Lawrence has been to eat grilled food. The connection to the gridiron is explicit and not at all subtle. This is the kind of humor that belongs to a tradition confident enough in the resurrection to laugh at the manner of a martyr's death - because Lawrence himself apparently laughed, and the tradition honored his laughter by taking it seriously.
Grill something on August 10th. Tell the children why. Let them laugh if they want to. A feast day meal that begins with "we're eating grilled food because the saint died on a grill, and he made a joke about it" is not disrespectful. It is profoundly Catholic. The saints are not solemn figures behind glass. They are people who met death and said something worth recording.
If grilling is not practical, any summer meal is fine. What matters is naming the feast, telling the story, and making August 10th a day the children associate with a specific person and a specific claim about the world.
The question worth asking
The feast of Saint Lawrence is the right occasion for a dinner table question that does not need to be asked on any particular schedule, but should be asked regularly.
Who are the poor in our neighborhood?
Not the abstract poor. The specific ones. The family down the street. The person who sleeps in the park two blocks over. The elderly neighbor who cannot drive and whose family does not visit. The classmate who comes to school without lunch. Catholic social teaching is clear that the poor are our concern because they are the Church's treasures - Lawrence named this with his life. But it needs to be made concrete and local for it to mean anything at the household level.
You do not need to have the answer. The question is sufficient. Asking it at dinner, on August 10th, and then again occasionally through the year, shapes the interior life of the household in ways that are slow but real.
Lawrence and the school year
One more practical note. In most of the United States, August 10th falls in the week before or the week of the return to school. Lawrence's feast arrives at the threshold of the new year, and his story is a useful frame for the children heading back into their communities.
What would it mean to go through a school year the way Lawrence went to the prefect's office? Not as a martyr - the children do not need to die for anything. But with the same quality of seeing. With eyes that look at the people around them and notice who is the treasure rather than who is the problem.
That is a formation goal worth naming on August 10th, over a plate of grilled food, before the school year begins.
On being a deacon who knows this story
I cannot write about Lawrence without naming what it means to be ordained to the diaconate and serve under his patronage.
The permanent diaconate was restored by the Second Vatican Council specifically to recover what Lawrence represents - the ordained ministry of service, the deacon whose work is to be the connection between the altar and the poor. He died rather than hand over the treasures because he had spent his ministry being with them. He knew them. They were not abstract to him.
That is the goal. Not the death on the gridiron. The knowing. The years of ministry with actual people in their actual need that produced the conviction that made the gridiron possible.
Your household does not have a gridiron before it. But it does have a neighborhood. Lawrence's feast is the invitation to go meet it.
Saint Lawrence is the patron of deacons, and the Iron & Altar path in Domus carries his spirit into the daily prayer of Catholic men. Start a 7-day free trial at WeAreDomus.com and meet the saints who are praying for you.