Sanctus Laurentius Justinianus, Episcopus et Confessor — a Life, for his feast on the fifth day of September, III classis
Statuit ei Dominus testamentum pacis, et principem fecit eum: ut sit illi sacerdotii dignitas in æternum. “The Lord made to him a covenant of peace, and made him a prince: that the dignity of priesthood should be to him for ever.” — Introit of the Mass, from Ecclesiasticus 45:30
I. Identitas et Origines
He was born at Venice on the first day of July, 1381, into the house of Giustiniani, one of the oldest of the patrician families of the Republic — a family that traced itself, with more pride than evidence, to the emperors of Constantinople, and that could point with better evidence to a long line of procurators, admirals, and doges’ councillors. His father, Bernardo Giustiniani, died while the children were young. His mother, Querina Querini, of a family scarcely less great, was left a widow with a large household and governed it, the accounts agree, with a piety that was severe and a charity that was not. She wore mourning for the rest of her life, distributed her wealth to the poor with both hands, and raised her children to regard the world’s honours as a thing one is born into and is not obliged to admire.
The principal witness to his life is his own nephew, Bernardo Giustiniani — senator, ambassador, and one of the finest Latin stylists of the Venetian humanism — who wrote the Vita some twenty years after the saint’s death from what he had seen himself and heard from the household. It is a work of family devotion and of genuine learning, and the reader should hold both facts in mind at once: it is close to the events, and it is written by a man who loved him.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The turning of his life came at nineteen, and the way it is told is characteristic of the man and of the age. Pious tradition relates that as the young Lorenzo was weighing what to do with himself — his mother was already arranging a marriage befitting the name — the Eternal Wisdom appeared to him in the form of a maiden of a beauty beyond the world’s, and offered herself to him as bride: peace of heart, and a love that does not end. He understood, as the Book of Wisdom had taught him to understand, that this was the Sapientia who “goeth about seeking such as are worthy of her” (Wis. 6:17), and he resolved to have no other spouse. Whether the vision is to be taken as an event or as the shape memory gave to a decision, the decision itself is documented by everything that followed: it governed him for fifty-five years, and the best of his writing is a treatise on exactly that marriage.
He went first to his mother’s brother, Marino Querini, a canon of the cathedral who had withdrawn with a few companions to the island of San Giorgio in Alga in the lagoon to lead a life of prayer and common poverty. There the young man tested himself with the questions a Venetian nobleman would ask — could he sleep on a hard bed, eat coarse food, be laughed at — and having answered them, he entered the little community about the year 1400. It was, in its first years, scarcely a congregation at all: a handful of secular priests and clerics living under a common discipline without a formal rule, among them two men who would matter a great deal to him later, Antonio Correr and Gabriele Condulmer, the latter the future Pope Eugene IV. Out of this beginning grew the Congregation of Secular Canons of San Giorgio in Alga, approved by Boniface IX in 1404, of which Lawrence would become the lawgiver.
The virtues of his youth were the plain ones, practised to a degree that unsettled his family. The canons lived by alms, and Lawrence begged for them in the streets of the city whose palaces bore his own name. Tradition preserves the scene at his mother’s door: sack over his shoulder, he asked for bread as a beggar, and when she — mortified — filled it to overflowing so that he need not go to another house, he took what one house would give and went on to the next. The point of the story is not the mother’s shame but the son’s refusal to be spared the ordinary humiliation that the poor are not spared.
He was ordained priest in 1406, at twenty-five. He said his first Mass, we are told, only after a long preparation and with such tears that the community feared for him. He became prior of San Giorgio, and then general of the congregation, an office he held more than once; he drew up its constitutions and set its tone, which was one of interior recollection more than of exterior austerity, and which made the Alga canons a seedbed of reform in the Venetian Church of the fifteenth century.
Of his temperament the sources give a consistent picture: grave, quiet, slow to speak and slower to be angry; a man who, when he was mocked in the street, went on walking; who took the lowest place so habitually that it ceased to be noticed; and whose interior life, as his books reveal, was one of continual and affectionate colloquy with God, rather than of visions, raptures, or the extraordinary. He was, in the language of the old spiritual writers, a man of devotio — of the will steadily bent toward God — before he was anything else.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
In 1433 his old companion of San Giorgio, now Eugene IV, named him Bishop of Castello — the episcopal see of Venice proper, whose cathedral of San Pietro stood at the city’s eastern edge. Lawrence did everything a man may honourably do to refuse. He wrote, he pleaded, he sent his brethren to plead; Eugene, who knew him, was not moved. He was consecrated and took possession of his church, and it was found, as it is always found in such cases, that the man who did not want the office was the man for it.
His household was reduced to a handful of servants; his table to what a poor priest would eat; his bed to straw with a coarse coverlet. The episcopal palace, which the Venetian nobility expected to be a place of hospitality on the scale of their own, became a place where the poor were fed and the great were received civilly and briefly. He would not enrich his relations, and said so in terms that were repeated across the city: that the poor were his treasurers, and that what came into the bishop’s hands went out again to those whose it was. A kinsman who came asking for a place was given a lecture on the vanity of places and sent away with a blessing.
His government of the diocese was that of a reformer without the reformer’s harshness. He restored discipline among the clergy of the city, chiefly by his example and by a patient refusal to tolerate the abuses that had become custom; he reformed convents of women that had grown lax; he founded, by one reckoning, fifteen religious houses in the course of his episcopate; he was assiduous in preaching, in hearing confessions, and in visiting the sick in the poorest quarters of the city. Venice in those years suffered war, plague, and factional bitterness, and the bishop was repeatedly the man to whom both sides could go. The Senate, which had a long and jealous tradition of keeping churchmen out of the Republic’s affairs, learned to seek his judgment.
Two episodes show the man’s measure. When the Republic, hard pressed for money, laid a tax on ecclesiastical revenues, Lawrence neither thundered from the pulpit nor quietly complied; he negotiated, obtained what could be obtained for the Church’s liberty, and paid the rest without complaint. And when a certain nobleman, in dispute with the bishop over a matter of jurisdiction, went about the city speaking of him with contempt, Lawrence sought him out, spoke to him gently, and — the sources are clear about this — won him, so that the man became one of his devoted friends. He held, and wrote, that a prelate’s authority is exercised chiefly by patience.
On the eighth of October, 1451, Nicholas V, by the bull Regis æterni, suppressed the ancient Patriarchate of Grado — a title that had wandered for centuries on the margin of the lagoon — and the See of Castello together, and united them in a new Patriarchate of Venice, with its seat at San Pietro di Castello. Lawrence Giustiniani was named its first Patriarch. He was seventy. He received the dignity as he had received the mitre, unwillingly, and changed nothing about his life to suit it. The straw bed remained.
IV. Mors et Cultus
He fell ill toward the end of 1455 and died at Venice on the eighth day of January following — a date that the older lives give as 1455 and the modern ones as 1456, the difference being only the Venetian custom of beginning the year in March. He was seventy-four, in the twenty-third year of his episcopate and the fifth of his patriarchate.
The manner of his dying has become the emblem of his life. Those about him, seeing that he lay on his straw pallet in the winter cold, brought a proper bed. He refused it, saying — and the sentence is in the nephew’s Vita — that his Redeemer had died upon a cross, and that he did not intend to die upon feathers. He spent his last hours in prayer, blessed those present, and gave up his soul with the words of the Psalmist: In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum. Pious tradition adds that the body remained for many days without corruption and with a sweet odour, and that the whole city came to see it.
He was buried in his cathedral of San Pietro di Castello, where his relics rest today. Miracles followed at the tomb, and the cultus was immediate and Venetian: the Republic that had kept its churchmen at arm’s length kept this one close. Clement VII confirmed the cultus and permitted his veneration as Blessed in 1524. He was canonized on the sixteenth of October, 1690, by Alexander VIII — Pietro Ottoboni, himself a Venetian, whose short pontificate is remembered for little else so honourable — and his feast was afterwards extended to the whole Latin Church under Innocent XII, placed on the fifth of September, the day associated in the Venetian tradition with his episcopal consecration, and thus kept at a distance from the Octave of the Epiphany that his dies natalis falls within.
In the calendar of the 1962 Missale Romanum his feast is a third-class feast, with the Mass Statuit of the Common of a Confessor Bishop and a proper Collect. The reformed calendar of 1969 no longer keeps him on the general calendar; his feast continues in Venice and among the congregations that descend from San Giorgio in Alga.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
He is the first Patriarch of Venice, but he is also, and more importantly for us, one of the considerable spiritual writers of the fifteenth century — an age in which the Latin Church produced Thomas à Kempis, Denis the Carthusian, and Nicholas of Cusa, and in which the Venetian bishop holds his own. He wrote in Latin, for clerics and religious rather than for the learned or the many, and his works were collected after his death and reprinted, notably in the Venetian editions of the eighteenth century. The principal titles are these.
De casto connubio Verbi et animæ — “On the chaste marriage of the Word and the soul” — is his masterpiece, and it is the vision of his nineteenth year turned into doctrine. He treats the soul’s union with the incarnate Word under the figure of the marriage of the Canticle: the Bridegroom’s condescension, the bride’s adornment by the virtues, the mutual love that grows by desire and by suffering, and its consummation in charity. What is characteristic is the sobriety. He is not writing of ecstasies; he is writing of the ordinary Christian life lived with the intensity of a betrothal.
Lignum vitæ — “The tree of life” — is an extended treatise on the virtues under the image of a tree whose root is humility, whose branches are the several virtues, and whose fruit is charity. He returns to the theme that runs through all his writing: that humility is not one virtue among the rest but the ground in which they are planted, and that a man who seeks the higher virtues without it builds in the air.
De triumphali agone Christi — “On the triumphant combat of Christ” — is a meditation on the Passion, in which the Cross is treated as a victory won by patience, and the Christian’s share in it as the pattern of every trial. It is, of all his books, the one that explains the straw bed.
Fasciculus amoris — “A little bundle of love” — treats of the love of God in its degrees; De perfectionis gradibus of the stages of the spiritual life; De disciplina et perfectione monasticæ conversationis of the religious state, drawn from his years at San Giorgio; and De institutione et regimine prælatorum of the duties of a prelate, in which he sets down, in effect, the rule he had kept as bishop: that the prelate is a servant, that his goods belong to the poor, and that he governs by suffering more than by commanding. To these are to be added his sermons and a number of shorter tracts on compunction, on contempt of the world, and on the cure of the passions.
Two themes bind the whole together. The first is the primacy of the interior: that God is sought and found in the recollected heart, and that exterior works, even the works of a bishop, are the overflow of that seeking or they are nothing. The second is the paradox of the Introit of his Mass — that the “covenant of peace” and the princedom are given to the man who has first made himself the least. He had read that sentence over the tomb of every confessor bishop of the Church; he took it as a rule of life, and the Church, by placing the sentence over his own tomb, has said that he read it rightly.
VI. Oratio
The Collect of the day, from the Common of a Confessor Bishop:
Da, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut beati Laurentii, Confessoris tui atque Pontificis, veneranda solemnitas, et devotionem nobis augeat, et salutem. Per Dominum.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that the venerable solemnity of blessed Lawrence, Thy Confessor and Bishop, may both increase our devotion and advance our salvation. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiratio
Sapientia æterna, quæ te iuveni Venetiano sponsam obtulisti, et in Patriarcha stramineo lecto moriente triumphasti: doce nos radicem humilitatis prius fodere quam ramos virtutum extendere; ut, cum Verbo tuo casto connubio coniuncti, in manus tuas spiritum nostrum commendemus.
“Eternal Wisdom, who didst offer thyself as bride to a young man of Venice, and didst triumph in a Patriarch dying on a bed of straw: teach us to dig the root of humility before we spread the branches of the virtues; that, joined to thy Word in chaste marriage, we may commend our spirit into thy hands.”
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Practice. Examine — on a single point: what comfort, honour, or small precedence am I administering so carefully that I would refuse the straw bed if it were offered? Do — this week, take what one house gives and go on to the next: accept the ordinary humiliation instead of arranging to be spared it. Pray — the Collect of the day, and the last words of the saint, In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum, said slowly at Compline. Devote — the Third Sorrowful Mystery, with attention to the crown of thorns, for a man who refused the mitre twice and wore it as a cross.
Sources. The foundational witness is the Vita beati Laurentii Iustiniani by Bernardo Giustiniani, the saint’s nephew (composed c. 1475), printed in the Acta Sanctorum for 8 January and prefixed to the editions of the collected works; it is near-contemporary and familial, to be read with both facts in view. The saint’s own writings, in the eighteenth-century Venetian Opera omnia, are the surest witness to his mind. The bull Regis æterni of Nicholas V (8 October 1451) documents the erection of the Patriarchate. Secondary orientation: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Lawrence Justinian”; the Bibliotheca Sanctorum, s.v. “Lorenzo Giustiniani”; the histories of the Congregation of San Giorgio in Alga. The vision of Eternal Wisdom, the scene at the mother’s door, and the incorruption of the body are pious tradition, transmitted through the nephew’s Vita, and are retained here for what they teach rather than asserted as history.
Paths. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the bishops who refused the mitre and wore it as a penance — Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales, Alphonsus Liguori — and, more nearly, with the fifteenth-century reformers of the Venetian Church, Eugene IV and Antonio Correr among them. The Spiritual Practices path takes up the De casto connubio alongside the Imitation of Christ as a fifteenth-century school of interior recollection. The Theology and Doctrine path treats humility as the root of the virtues in the Thomistic order (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 161), which Lawrence’s Lignum vitæ renders in the language of the garden. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Common of a Confessor Bishop — Statuit, Ecce sacerdos magnus, the parable of the talents — as the Church’s standing portrait of what a bishop is for.
Sancte Laurenti Iustiniane, Patriarcha Venetiarum, ora pro nobis.