Venerable Matt Talbot

Who they were

Matt Talbot is not a canonized saint, and his page says so at the top rather than at the bottom. He was declared Venerable by Paul VI in 1975, which means the Church has recognised heroic virtue and the cause has not completed. He has no feast day. He is included here because he is the figure recovery communities in the English-speaking world actually turn to, and leaving him out to keep the list tidy would be a strange kind of honesty.

He was born in Dublin in 1856, one of twelve children in a poor family, and left school around twelve to work. He was drinking heavily by then. For the next sixteen years he was, by his own later account and his family's, an alcoholic: he drank his wages, pawned his boots, and on one occasion stole a fiddle from a blind street musician to sell for drink, which he later said troubled him more than anything else he had done.

In 1884, aged twenty-eight, broke and standing outside a pub where none of his friends would buy him a drink, he went home and told his mother he was going to take the pledge. He took it for three months, because he did not believe he could manage longer. He renewed it, and then again, and he did not drink for the remaining forty-one years of his life.

What followed was not dramatic. He kept working as a labourer in a timber yard. He lived with extreme simplicity, gave away most of his wages, read theology he had to teach himself to follow, and prayed for hours before work. He also spent years trying to find the musician he had stolen from, to pay him back, and never found him.

He collapsed and died on his way to Mass on Trinity Sunday, 1925, in Granby Lane, Dublin. He was unidentified at first, because nobody knew who he was.

Why people turn to Venerable Matt Talbot

The devotion is entirely about the sixteen years and the forty-one. He is not asked for because he was a great man who happened to have a problem, but because he was an ordinary labourer whose whole recognised virtue is that he stopped and stayed stopped, one renewal at a time, without money, treatment, or a programme. Recovery communities took him up long before Rome did, and the three-month pledge, renewed rather than sworn once, is the part people find usable: he did not believe he could do it for life either.

How to ask their intercession

Ask him to pray for the next stretch rather than for the whole of it, which is the unit recovery actually works in. He is asked for by people in recovery and by the families waiting on someone who is not there yet. Nothing about asking him replaces treatment, a programme, or a doctor, and his own sobriety involved decades of ordinary, unglamorous routine.