On the centenary of the death of Venerable Matt Talbot, Fr Seán Coyle recalls this popular patron of those struggling with alcoholism who may become the first person connected with the Columbans to be canonised.
Venerable Matt Talbot died one hundred years ago on 7th June 1925, which was Trinity Sunday that year. He was on his way to Mass in St Saviour’s Church in Dominick Street, Dublin, and dropped dead on Granby Lane, behind the church. He was 69.
Some penitential chains were found on Matt’s body. He wore these on special occasions, a symbol of having made himself a slave of Our Blessed Mother, following the spirituality of St Louis-Marie de Montfort. These chains led people to discover his remarkable story.
Matt was born in 1856 in the North Strand area of Dublin, the second of the ten children of Charlie, a heavy drinker, and Elizabeth. Between the ages of 11 and 12 he sometimes attended nearby O’Connell’s Primary School and was noted in the roll book as a ‘mitcher’ (truant). He was barely literate when he left to take a job in a bottling company where he developed a taste for drink and was an alcoholic by the age of 16.
This continued until he was 28. He often bought a drink for others but one evening in September 1884, when he had no money, nobody would buy him one. This was like a knife through Matt’s heart but that knife was God’s ‘scalpel’.
He went home and told his mother he was going to ‘take the pledge’, to promise God he would never drink again. He went and spoke to a priest in nearby Clonliffe College, the Dublin Diocesan seminary which closed in 2019. He had long since stopped receiving the sacraments, though he went to Mass every Sunday and said the Hail Mary every day.
Matt began to live a life of intense asceticism of prayer and penance based on that of the early Irish monks, under the direction of Fr James Walsh and later under Fr Michael Hickey. He went to early Mass daily before going to work as a labourer on the Dublin docks in T&C Martin’s timber yard.
Letter from Venerable Matt Talbot to the Columbans dating from December 1924. Courtesy: Columban Archives in Dalgan.
On Sundays he attended several Masses in churches in the city centre. His workmates respected his deep faith and during breaks he would find a quiet spot to pray. Fr Hickey encouraged Matt to read works by St Augustine, St Catherine of Siena and others, which required a lot of work by Matt as up to then he could hardly read or write. One of his favourites was St Thérèse of Lisieux, canonised by Pope Pius XI three weeks before Matt’s death.
Matt spent very little of his wages on himself and gave most of his money to his mother, which he had failed to do during his drinking years. He shared the rest with others. These included the Maynooth Mission to China, as the Columbans were initially known in Ireland.
In December 1924, six months before his death, Matt wrote to the Columbans: “Matt Talbot have done no work for past 18 months. I have been sick and given over by priest and doctor. I don’t think I will work any more. There one pound from me and ten Shillings from my sister.”
This amount was more than a week’s wages at the time for an unskilled labourer, an enormous amount for a man who had been unemployed for 18 months. The letter is in the Columban archives here in Dalgan Park, Navan.
Before his death Matt was known only to his family, neighbours and workmates. In 1931 Archbishop Edward J. Byrne of Dublin opened the process for the beatification of this unskilled labourer from the slums of Dublin. By then Matt was a household name in Ireland. In 1947 he was given the title ‘Servant of God’. In 1975 Pope St Paul VI, who was familiar with Matt’s story from his days as a young priest in the Nunciature in Dublin, declared Matt ‘Venerable’, the step before beatification.
He became known outside of Ireland when in the early 1940s a small group of AA members in New Jersey began what became the Matt Talbot Retreat Movement for recovering alcoholics. That has spread throughout the US and Canada. There are various other ministries and programmes for recovering addicts in Ireland and elsewhere that use Matt’s name.
The only known image of the Dublin ascetic – first on the left with the moustache.
Matt was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery but in 1972 his remains were removed to a newly-built shrine in Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Seán McDermott Street in the area where he spent most of his life. God has used Matt to give hope to countless persons caught in addiction.
Matt once said to his sister Susan, “Never think harshly of a person because of the drink. It’s easier to get out of hell than to give up the drink. For me it was only possible with the help of God and our Blessed Mother.”
Fr Seán Coyle is from Dublin. Ordained in 1967, he spent most of his life on mission in the Philippines where he was Editor of Misyon magazine. He is now retired and living in Dalgan.
First published in the May/June 2025 issue of the Far East magazine. Please subscribe here and support our Missionaries: https://columbans.ie/far-east-magazine/
