In August 258 the emperor Valerian issued an edict ordering the immediate execution of Christian bishops, priests, and deacons, part of a renewed persecution aimed squarely at the church's clergy and property rather than at ordinary believers. Pope Sixtus II was seized and killed on 6 August while presiding at a service in the catacombs, along with several of his deacons. Lawrence, one of the seven deacons who administered the material affairs of the Roman church and its charitable funds, was left alive for four more days, and the Roman prefect used the time to demand he surrender the church's treasury, assuming a substantial store of gold and valuables was in his keeping.
Lawrence asked for three days to gather the treasure together. According to the account Ambrose of Milan records roughly a century later, he spent the time instead distributing whatever funds the church held to Rome's poor, then assembled the blind, the lame, the sick, and the destitute of the city and presented them to the prefect, declaring that these were the treasures of the Church, since it was in caring for such people that the church's wealth was truly spent. The prefect, understanding the gesture as defiance, had Lawrence put to death.
The story's core claim, that a deacon charged with church funds chose to give them to the poor rather than surrender them to the state, fits what is independently known of how the early Roman church organized its charitable giving through its deacons, even where the precise details of the confrontation cannot be verified against an eyewitness source.