Another voice
. Lessons from St Lawrence
Auberon Waugh
Montmaur, Aude, France At this time of year I generally invite readers of the Spectator to meditate on the death of St Lawrence the Martyr, whose slow roasting on a gridiron in the year 258 is celebrated in the neighbouring village of Puginier by three nights of dancing, a bicycle race and a huge feast of cassoulet and grilled Toulouse sausage. St Lawrence was in charge of all church treasure in Rome, including the sacred vessels used in church services, and his refusal to hand them over to the pagan military prefect might indeed provide inspiration to those countless parish churches in England which are busy trying to sell their church plate for some insignificant temporal purpose. St Lawrence, it will be remembered, readily agreed to hand over all his treasure, but when the moment came to deliver the goods he played a little joke. He collected all the decrepit folk of Rome who were at that time living on the church's alms — the blind, the lame, the maimed, the lepers, widows, orphans and virgins — and made them stand in rows. One might have thought the virgins would add a little colour to this turn-out of Lord Snowdon's army, but according to Lawrence's chronicler, St Ambrose, they made a horrid sight. Then he told the prefect that these people were his church's chief treasures.
The joke went down very well with various legionaries standing around, several of whom decided to become RCs on the spot and were accordingly beheaded, but the prefect was not at all amused and set up his gridiron, as already reported. While roasting, the martyr gave off a sweet, agreeable smell and kept up his jokes to the very end, instructing his executioners to turn his body so that the other side was properly cooked.
Last year, as people may remember, the cure of Puginier — a wise and holy man, celebrated for many miles around — used the story to illustrate the jocularity of God and the essential joke at the centre of the Christian religion to which St Paul draws our attention from time to time, that the wisdom of men is the foolishness of God. This year at the 11 o'clock Mass he drew attention to parish records of the last century which described how the Feast of St Lawrence had been celebrated in former times, starting with Mass at four o'clock in the morning, a procession and further liturgical practices throughout much of the day until, presumably, they hit the cassoulet in the evening.
The church, as always, was packed to hear what this sane, learned and highly intelligent man would say; but how many of us, he asked, would have turned up to hear him at four o'clock in the morning? In those times — less than 100 years ago — it was considered a perfectly normal thing to do, he said, and he spent a large part of the rest of his sermon listing the ways in which religion generally, and the Catholic Church in particular, had retreated from the forefront of people's activities.
Just as in the days of St Lawrence the church was already running homes for the disabled, the insane, women, lepers and the very old, so throughout much of its history it has enjoyed a virtual monopoly in education, science, philosophy, medicine, social work and community welfare. In the cure's own memory it had run all the colonies de vacance of which not one remained in church hands. Science had left the pursuit of religious truth behind and government agencies had taken over education, medical and social welfare. But there was still one essential, irreducible function which only the Church could undertake, said the cure, and that was to answer the question of purpose or direction: where do we come from, where are we going to? Beside it, all temporal questions faded into insignificance.
When after church, I mentioned to the cure that he was the only Catholic priest around nowadays with whom I found myself in total agreement, he looked alarmed and said he was not sure whether to take that as a compliment. But there was nothing unorthodox, or even aggressively `traditional' in what he had said. It was no more than a commonsense assessment of the Church's surviving function: to cater for that philosophical uncertainty which is bound to exist in the minds of reflective people and which may, eventually, lead them to God. The Church can only point a way, provide a sense of direction. Any final decision must always remain a personal one, the relationship between man and God being the most intimate of human relationships; any communal demonstration or collective participation in church affairs is no more than window-dressing for this intensely personal choice. An individual can celebrate the choice, if he finds it helps, with others of the same persuasion, but such activities can scarcely be seen as an important part of the religious process.
The cure may not have been aware that the Catholic Church in England, confronted with the same problem, has reached exactly the opposite conclusions: that the `new' role of the Church is to involve itself in social work and Third World agitation as a minor adjunct to the government social services and pressure groups within the democratic process; that goodness consists in immolation of self within the community; that by bringing forward the liturgy as a sort of agape or love-feast where people will clap their hands together and hug each other they will re-create that idea of the Select which inspired the early church.
One reasons for the unappealing — not to say abject or loathsome — demeanour of the Catholic Church in England was not touched upon by the holy cure in his analysis of the Church in retreat. This is quite simplY that, whereas in former times it attracted many of the cleverest and most ambitious people in the land into Holy Orders, since it offered the only means by which a gifted butcher's boy like Wolsey could rise to the highest office in the land, it now attracts only those who want to be priests. Many, if not most, of these are soft in the head. Greater reliance on the laity brings forward a new race of activists who do not seem to realise how repugnant they seem, or how alien their preoccupations are, to the quieter majority of Catholics. There are countless other aspects to the martyrdom of St Lawrence, and I hope to discuss them every year at about this time for many years to come, but its most obvious relevance to the modern Church has been overlooked. An essential feature of the early church, whose spirit modern churchmen are so sedulously trying to recreate, is that it was intensely persecuted. One sometimes wonders if the modern faction, led by Monsignor Derek Worlock. the dread Archbishop of Liverpool, is aware of this essential characteristic. Grisly and bizarre martyrdoms were a more or less day-to-day occurrence. In the month of August alone we celebrate beside St Lawrence (who was roasted) some 30 early Christian martyrs who suffered other fearsome torments: the memorable St Stephen, Pope and Martyr, who was beheaded on his own pontifical throne in 257 (2 August); St Hippolytus, who was dragged apart by enraged horses in 252 (13 August); SS Timothy, Agapius and Theala (19 August) who were eaten by wild beasts in the amphitheatre at Caesarea in 304; the three brothers SS Claudius, Asterius and Neon who were crucified after being half-roasted, their sisters Domina and Theorilla, roasted and scourged, all in 285 (23 August). It seems to me that any attempt to recreate the spirit of the early church without this background of martyrdom is doomed. Oddly enough, I can find no trace of there ever having been a St Derek, although it seems odd that an important prelate should go around with a pagan forename. But then, as the priest-said who baptised my second daughter, there always has to be a first St Daisy.
Previous page
