Although the early medieval Irish saints are the usual focus of this blog, its title is ‘All the Saints of Ireland’ and thus by marking the centenary of the death of The Venerable Matthew Talbot, I am not straying from my brief. For by his ascetical lifestyle, Matt Talbot (May 2 1856-June 7 1925) has a particular link to the early Irish saints, one which Father James Cassidy, writing just a few years after Matt’s death, identified:

IN the golden days of her early monastic church Ireland could boast of an asceticism most probably unrivalled throughout the whole Christian world. Great austerities were a part of the daily life of the monk, and, because the monastic ideal governed the Celtic church, the monk demanded that the ordinary layman doing penance for his sins should do so in the most thorough fashion. Thus it came to pass that severe self-discipline became a marked feature of Irish Christian tradition and a virtue sorely needed in later days to maintain the faith in the land when the cross of persecution dwelt therein for centuries. Thanks to these facts, there is still in Ireland a clear recognition of the cross as something necessary and blessed in the Christian life.



Of the survival of this tradition of the Cross in modern days we have splendid proof in the life of MattTalbot. Though only a humble labourer far removed from the influence of conventual discipline, the record of his austerities bears comparison with the best of saintly anchorite or monk of old.



Accordingly we find him in the first days of his changed life never in the enjoyment of a full meal, and partaking of no meat on Wednesdays, Fridays or Saturdays. Night-time saw him stretch his weary limbs on a plank-bed with very scanty covering. And to add to the sacrifice of abstention from drink, he forsook the pipe which most manual workers love so much. All this, surely, was a respectable start on the way of the Cross for one whose day’s work made such a demand on his physical resources.



All this, however, was little compared with the sacrifices he made when he began to find his full spiritual stride. On Sundays he was content with one fairly substantial meal, or two very light ones. Dry bread and black tea was his fare for Mondays. Tuesdays and Thursdays were as rigorous, as Mondays, except for the taking of a little meat. Wednesdays excluded meat, but sometimes permitted a little butter. Fridays were days of full fast, whilst Saturdays and vigils of feasts added to rigid fasting the exclusion of milk. Lent he observed daily by two slight meals without meat, butter or milk. Every day in June witnessed a, similar fast in honour of the Sacred Heart…. 



…Profoundly, indeed, did he share in the sacrificial folly of the “King of Penitents ” – as a note of his expressed it- “who pass for fools in the opinion of the world.”



Rev. James F. Cassidy, ‘Matt. Talbot: A Great Penitent’. The Irish Monthly, 61 (No. 720), (Jun., 1933), 374–379.

Passionist Father Edmund of Mount Argus in Dublin, who wrote the foreword to Father Cassidy’s book Matt Talbot: The Irish Worker’s Glory, commented in like vein:


The emergence of a figure like Matt Talbot in our days is an unique thing. In the jargon of modern psychologists, it is a spiritual atavism, a throw-back to days long passed away. It is equivalent to the apparition of the sixth-century hermit amidst the rush and bustle of to-day. Considered under this aspect, the figure of Matt Talbot has a two-fold significance.



He is in the great tradition of Gaelic spirituality. Despite the lapse of centuries, despite the vast change of conditions and circumstances, despite the vicissitudes of the race, Matt Talbot is spiritually akin to the great heroes of the ancient Irish Church. Their austerities were the austerities which he practised; St. Kevin of Glendalough, or St. Enda of Aran would recognise in him the essential outline of their own lives. The extraordinary nature of this thing is not at first obvious. The same truth appears at two ends of a tradition which has stretched-unobserved but imperishable-over an interval of a thousand years.



And this, moreover, has happened apparently without any conscious striving or deliberate imitation, for in the books used by Matt Talbot there are none which treat of the Saints of Ireland. This remarkable fact deserves prominence, for as Chesterton has well said, using a similar argument in favour of St. Francis of Assisi, “the tradition has preserved the truth.”

…

But it is the mode of his being Catholic that lends such vital importance to his life. For Matt Talbot was a contemplative, one whose soul continually turned towards God, one whose mind was absorbed in God. The magnitude of this achievement has not, we think, been sufficiently recognised. By far the great majority of contemplatives, whether canonised or not, have been members of religious orders. Their lives were sheltered by the walls of monastery or convent, the distractions of the world were reduced to a minimum or eliminated altogether; they were helped by the good example of companions, and were assisted by assiduous direction and frequent spiritual conferences. Not so with Matt Talbot. For a cloister he had the busy streets of his native city; for a cell the back room of a tenement house; for companions men who had little appreciation of spiritual realities; for a place of retirement a shed in the corner of the timber-yard.

Rev. J. F. Cassidy, Matt Talbot: The Irish Worker’s Glory (Newman Press, 1948), ix-xi.


Whilst I appreciate that for many people today it is Matt’s patronage of those who struggle with addiction which they find most compelling, for me it is what Fathers Cassidy and Edmund CP have identified above – the adoption by a layman of the modern era of the ascetical discipline more usually associated with the early monastic saints of Ireland. Unlike Saint Kevin, surrounded by the natural beauty of the monastic city of Glendalough, Matt was an urban hermit in a very different environment. I found Father Edmund’s contention that Matt had adopted this lifestyle without any conscious desire to imitate the Irish saints, particularly interesting. Mary Purcell in the appendices to her book Remembering Matt Talbot lists Lives of the Irish Saints among the tomes read by Matt and the Life of Saint Patrick by Father Morris, the Life of Saint Laurence O’Toole and The Ancient Irish Church by Father Gaffney among those lent to him by a friend. Whilst the Life of Saint Laurence O’Toole may well be that published in 1877 by Canon O’Hanlon, the Lives of the Irish Saints read by Matt may not be his multi-volume magnum opus but rather a series of penny pamphlets called Footprints of Ireland’s Saints issued by the Irish Messenger and issued in at least two small bound volumes with the title Lives of the Irish Saints. I have Volume II on my own bookshelves and given Matt’s fondness for this type of popular literature I wonder if this might have been the Lives of the Irish Saints collection which he read. In any case it remains true that books on the early Irish church and its saints form only a tiny fraction of the titles identified by Mary Purcell. Father Edmund’s point that Matt does not seem to have consciously read himself into adopting the austerities of historic Irish monasticism is therefore something to consider.


Another practice of Matt’s which Mary Purcell describes also struck a chord with me:


Several of his fellow-workers testified to a habit Matt had of keeping a pebble in his mouth – a small, smooth white pebble which he carried about with him. No one asked him why, nor did he volunteer any explanation.

but she went on to describe how the pebble was employed during the visits of a friend who enjoyed smoking his pipe whilst he and Matt discussed their latest reading:


When Mr Robbins called, Matt would ask him to take out his pipe and light up; the visitor did not like doing this as he thought it not quite right to enjoy in the other’s company a comfort of which Matt was depriving himself. But Matt would insist; “I have this” he would say going to the mantelpiece and fetching the pebble; “now, light up, John, and enjoy your smoke.” Then there were would follow a discussion of the last book read, while John Robbins puffed away at his pipe and Matt sucked meditatively on his pebble.

Mary Purcell, Matt Talbot And His Times: a New Authentic Life of the Servant of God (1954), 134.

The image of a man with a pebble in his mouth immediately brought to my mind the unusual Lenten discipline of early Irish saint Ultan Tua the ‘quiet man’ of Clane. The Martyrology of Donegal recorded on his December 22nd feast day: “This is the Ultan-Tua who used to put a stone in his mouth at the time of Lent, so that he might not speak at all.”


I will close with another aspect of Matt Talbot’s spirituality, perhaps one less familiar to people in Ireland. In his 1980 study of the tradition of ‘holy folly’ Father John Saward cited Matt as an exemplar of a ‘Fool for Christ’s sake’, saying:

Perhaps the most striking modern Irish holy man is Matt Talbot, ‘the Irish Worker’s Glory’, who was a fool for Christ’s sake in the classical sense.

He too noted that Matt:

embarked on a life of such heroism that it is difficult to believe we are describing a twentieth-century working man and not a fourth-century monk.


and he concluded:

Finally, there is his teaching on folly for Christ’s sake. Among the collection of tiny scraps of paper on which he wrote his thoughts and memorabilia, are the following:



Oh King of Penitents who pass for fools in the opinion of the world but very dear to you oh Jesus Christ. 




O Blessed Mother obtain from Jesus a share of His Folly.




The Kingdom of Heaven was promised not to the sensible and the educated but to such as have the spirit of little children.

John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality, (Oxford University Press, 1980), 208-210.


Matt’s famous chains were discovered only when his body was being prepared at the Jervis Street Hospital morgue. The sister on duty that day, Sister Ignatius, gave this testimony:

I was called and went, along with a nurse and a hospital porter, to prepare the body for burial. As I was cutting away the clothes from his arms, my scissors struck something hard. It was his chains. I didn’t know what to make of it – whether he was a saint or what he was. In a few minutes the porter also discovered chains binding his body around the waist. I remember the porter said, “He’s either a madman or a saint.” (italics mine)

Rev. Albert H Dolan, O.Carm., We Knew Matt Talbot (Carmelite Press, 1948), 93-4.

The anonymous porter may not have been consciously aware of the tradition of holy folly but his ‘madman or saint’ comment summarized it in a nutshell.

On the Feast of All the Saints of Ireland, November 6, 1931, just six years after Matt’s death, the Most Rev. Edward Byrne, Archbishop of Dublin announced the opening of the Informative Process for his Beatification. A prayer was also authorized, one rather different in tone from the prayer in current use which concentrates on Matt’s patronage of those struggling with addictions. It reads:


O Jesus, true friend of the humble worker, Thou hast given us in Thy servant Matthew a wonderful example of victory over vice, a model of penance and of love for Thy Holy Eucharist; grant, we beseech Thee, that we Thy servants may overcome all our wicked passions and sanctify our lives with penance and love like this.

And if it be in accordance with Thy adorable designs that Thy pious servant should be glorified by the Church, deign to manifest, by Thy heavenly favours the power he enjoys in Thy sight, Who livest and reignest forever and ever. Amen.

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