Matthew 'Matt' Talbot

Life

Matthew Talbot was born on 2 May 1856 at 13 Aldborough Court, Dublin, the second of twelve children of Charles Talbot, a docker, and Elizabeth Bagnall. The family was desperately poor; Matt left school barely able to read and went to work at twelve in a wine merchant's bottling stores, where he began drinking and, by his teenage years, was already a heavy drinker.

For the next sixteen years his life was dominated by alcohol. He drank his wages, pawned his boots, and on at least one occasion stole and sold the violin of a blind beggar he knew, an incident that later haunted his conscience. In September 1884, aged twenty-eight, penniless and refused drink on credit by his friends outside O'Meara's pub in Newcomen Bridge, he went home and took 'the pledge' of total abstinence — first for three months, then six, then for life. He never drank again.

The remaining forty years of his life unfolded in radical hiddenness. He worked as a labourer for T. & C. Martin's timber yards on the North Wall, attended daily Mass before work, fasted strictly, slept on a plank with a wooden block for a pillow, and learned by heart vast portions of Scripture and the writings of the Fathers. He saved Charles de Montfort's True Devotion and the lives of the saints almost as a treasury. He gave nearly all of his wages in secret charity — to the missions, to families in need, and to fellow workers.

On 7 June 1925, Trinity Sunday, he collapsed and died in Granby Lane on his way to Mass at the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street. When his body was examined chains and cords were discovered wound around his waist, arms and legs — the only evidence those who knew him had of his interior penances.

On 6 November 1931 Archbishop Edward Byrne of Dublin opened the diocesan inquiry into his cause. On 3 October 1975 Pope Saint Paul VI declared him Venerable. He is venerated worldwide as a patron of those struggling with alcoholism and addiction, and his tomb in Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Sean McDermott Street, Dublin, remains a place of pilgrimage.