He was addicted to alcohol.
He drank away his wages.
He broke his mother’s heart.
And the Church now calls him Venerable Matt Talbot.
Matt grew up in grinding poverty in Dublin. By his teens, drink owned him.
He spent his pay at the pub before it ever reached home.
If there was no money, he begged.
If no one gave, he went without — or stole a drink.
Alcohol was not a habit. It was a master.
For years, Matt tried and failed to stop. Promises collapsed by nightfall.
Shame followed him like a shadow.
He knew he was trapped — and he hated it.
For 15 years—until he was almost 30—Matt was an active alcoholic.
One morning, after another humiliating night,
Matt stood outside a pub with no money and no friends willing to help.
No one came.
Something inside him finally broke.
He went home.
He knelt.
And he made a quiet, desperate promise to God:
“I’ll try for three months.”
No thunder.
No vision.
Just a decision — and grace waiting to meet it.
Those three months became six.
Six became a year.
A year became forty years of sobriety.
Matt rebuilt his life slowly and painfully. He went to daily Mass before work.
He prayed the rosary while walking Dublin’s streets.
He did penance no one asked for and no one saw.
To keep his body obedient, he wore chains under his clothes — not as self-hatred, but as a reminder:
“I am not free on my own. I need God.”
When Matt died suddenly on the street in 1925.
He died on his way to church on Trinity Sunday.
People were shocked by how poor he looked.
Then they found the chains.
The city stopped.
The drunk everyone had written off had become a quiet giant of holiness.
Matt Talbot teaches us:
Addiction is not the end of the story.
Failure does not disqualify you.
Grace works in inches — but it works.
If you feel owned by a habit…
If you’ve tried and failed more times than you can count…
If you think sanctity is for “other people”…
Matt Talbot is proof that God starts exactly where we are weakest.
Venerable Matt Talbot, pray for us.
