Who was Venerable Matt Talbot?
Matt Talbot was born on May 2, 1856, at 13 Aldborough Court in the North Strand, in Dublin's inner city, to Charles and Elizabeth Talbot. The Archdiocese of Dublin says he was the second of twelve children; the Columban missionaries say ten. The family was poor. He had about a year of schooling and left at twelve unable to read or write.
He went to work as a messenger boy for a wine merchant and began drinking what was left in the bottles. The archdiocese says he was a chronic alcoholic at thirteen; Archbishop Dermot Farrell says he began drinking at twelve; the Columbans say he was an alcoholic by sixteen. He worked in the whiskey stores of the Port and Docks Board and in timber yards, and he drank every wage. He borrowed, scrounged, pawned his boots, and once stole a violin from a street musician and sold it for drink.
In 1884, when he was twenty-eight, he stood outside a pub with his brother, broke and hungover, waiting for someone to stand them a drink. Friends walked past them into the bar. The archdiocese's account says he was "cut to the heart." He went home and told his mother he was going to take the pledge. She said, "don't take the pledge unless you are going to keep it." He went to Holy Cross College, Clonliffe, made his confession, and took the pledge for three months. Then six. Then for life. The first seven years, the archdiocese says, "were very difficult."
"In those days before Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)," the archdiocese writes, "it was a lonely struggle." What he had was daily Mass before work, the rosary, and a priest, Fr. Michael Hickey, who guided him for most of his life and had him read Scripture, the lives of the saints and Augustine's Confessions. He looked for the violinist to pay him back, could not find him, and gave the money to the Church to have a Mass said for him. He became a Third Order Franciscan in 1890.
He stayed a laborer all his life, at a building contractor's and then at Martin's timber yard, where he took the hardest jobs, and he gave most of what he earned away, some of it to the missions. After his mother died in 1915 he lived alone in an attic room and slept on a plank with a block of wood for a pillow.
On Sunday, June 7, 1925, on his way to Mass at St. Saviour's, Dominick Street, he collapsed and died in Granby Lane. The Dominicans at St. Saviour's, the Columbans and Franciscan Media say it was Trinity Sunday; the archdiocese's resource book says Corpus Christi. At Jervis Street Hospital they found chains wound around his waist, an arm and a leg, worn, the archdiocese says, as a sign that he had given himself to Mary. He was buried at Glasnevin. In 1972 his remains were moved to a shrine in Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Seán McDermott Street, in the streets where he had lived.
The Archbishop of Dublin opened an inquiry into his life (the archdiocese dates it to 1941, the Dominicans and Columbans to 1931). In 1947 Rome gave him the title Servant of God. On October 3, 1975, Pope Paul VI declared him Venerable. He has no feast day, and will have none unless he is beatified, which requires a miracle.
Why Catholics pray to Matt Talbot for addiction
He is not a saint yet and he has no declared patronage. Franciscan Media writes that he "can be considered the patron of men and women struggling with alcoholism," and that is how he is used. Addiction clinics and hostels around the world carry his name, and the Columbans record that AA members in New Jersey began the Matt Talbot Retreat Movement in the early 1940s.
Catholics pray to him because he was one of them. He did not drink a little. He drank for sixteen years, the archdiocese and Archbishop Farrell say (Franciscan Media says fifteen), and lost everything that could be pawned. He got sober without a treatment center, which nobody should try to repeat, and the archdiocese says he stayed sober for the next forty years. His answer, as the archbishop records it, was: "For me, it was only possible with the help of God and our Blessed Mother." And to his sister: "Never think harshly of a person because of the drink. It is easier to get out of hell than it is to give up the drink."
Preaching at the centenary of his death in 2025, Archbishop Farrell quoted a saying that sums him up: "Matt was a bad alcoholic, but he was not a hopeless alcoholic." Addiction, the archbishop said, is a disease found at every level of society, and it needs "timely intervention" and "the provision of help." "Isolation undermines hope; it brings darkness and despair in its wake." And: "Nobody does this on their own."
How to pray to Matt Talbot
Because he is Venerable and not Blessed, there is no Mass or liturgical day in his honor. The Archdiocese of Dublin keeps the anniversary of his death, June 7, and Franciscan Media notes that his memory is kept on June 19. Any day works. His remains rest in Our Lady of Lourdes Church on Seán McDermott Street, Dublin, if you can get there.
Say the prayer below in the morning, when he went to Mass. Then do one concrete thing he did: go to Mass, go to Confession, say a decade of the rosary, pay back one debt. Ask him for today, not for forever. Franciscan Media's reflection on him says it plainly: "He had to take one day at a time."
Prayer to Matt Talbot goes alongside treatment, a recovery program, a sponsor, a counselor or a doctor; it never replaces them. He did not have those things. You do. If you are in danger from withdrawal or from yourself, call emergency services tonight and pray afterward.