Tag Archives: Theobald Mathew

Reporting Matt Talbot’s life and death, then and now

Leave a reply

Matt Talbot, a role model for many people battling alcoholism and addiction, died June 7, 1925, in a Dublin alleyway. He was on his way to Mass; an austere Catholicism being key to his sobriety. Then an anonymous ascetic, today Talbot is considered for sainthood.

The only known image of Matt Talbot.

The Dublin press missed Talbot’s public passing; no one- or two-sentence brief under a headline such as “Laborer Collapses Near Church.” There was no obituary–“Talbot, Matthew, 1856-1925.” This seems fitting given Talbot’s determined avoidance of newspapers, lest the headlines “violate the interior space of his soul” and distract from his prayer life. [1]James F. Cassidy, Matt Talbot: The Irish Worker’s Glory. [Westminster, Maryland: Newsman Press, 1934],4.

But details of Talbot’s death, and life, began to emerge in the Irish press before the end of 1925. A small pamphlet written by Sir Joseph A. Glynn of the Catholic Truth Society, Dublin, gained popular attention.[2]”Catholic Outlook: Dublin Laborer’s Remarkable Life of Penance”, The Nationalist and Munster Advertiser, Dec. 5, 1925. Talbot’s story of self-denial spread to the United States, then five years into a 13-year period of federally-enforced prohibition. In 1928 Glynn published a more detailed, 116-page account about Talbot.

Catholic faithful and the recovery community have kept Talbot in the press ever since. There’s a Wikipedia page, and plenty of other online content. A docudrama about Talbot’s life is in production. Press accounts of the 1879 Marian apparition at Knock, County Mayo, also were delayed until believers similarly promoted the event through literature and pilgrimages. It is now a tourist stop.

People stand where Matt Talbot died in Granby Lane, Dublin, in June 1925. The large building in center background is St. Saviour’s Church, where he attended Mass. Image from Glynn’s 1928 book about Talbot.

Talbot mirrored–as in reflected but reversed–another Irishman, Father Theobald Mathew (1790-1856). The Tipperary-born Capuchin priest became widely known as the “apostle of temperance.” From 1849-1951 he administered his famous abstinence pledge in the United States. Talbot, as noted above, was an unknown laborer who probably never ventured beyond Dublin’s Grand and Royal canals. He kept his piety and his 41 years of sobriety to himself.

“Perhaps no two men in history led such dissimilar lives, but with such similar and effective application of purpose,” a Catholic journalist observed in a 1956 article that marked the centenary of Talbot’s birth, seven months before Mathews’ death.[3]”1956 Centenary Year of Father Mathew, Matt Talbot”, The Catholic Northwest Progress, April 20, 1956.

The Catholic Church declared Talbot venerable in 1973. The early step toward sainthood seems to have stalled since then, but the Knights of St Columbanus are using the centenary of his death to renew the effort. Talbot is still a step ahead of Father Mathew. Both men are remembered with statues and other markers in Dublin and other parts of Ireland.

As other writers have noted, Talbot’s aversion to newspapers appears to have been inspired by Bishop John Hedley, an English Benedictine and editor of the Dublin Review. Talbot is said to have underlined this passage of Hedley’s book, On Reading:

Even when the newspaper is free from objection, it is easy to lose a good deal of time over it. It may be necessary and convenient to know what is going on in the world. But there can be no need of our observing all the rumors, all the guesses and gossip, all the petty incidents, all the innumerable paragraphs in which the solid news appears half-drowned, like the houses and hedges when the floods are out. This is idle and is absolutely bad for the brain and character.

Hedley’s view certainly applies to much of today’s online content, just as it did to early twentieth century Dublin newspapers. I leave to readers’ judgement whether it applies to Talbot’s story, or to this post.

Headline of 1926 profile of Matt Talbot in the Tablet, a Catholic newspaper in Brooklyn, NY.

References

References
↑1 James F. Cassidy, Matt Talbot: The Irish Worker’s Glory. [Westminster, Maryland: Newsman Press, 1934],4.
↑2 ”Catholic Outlook: Dublin Laborer’s Remarkable Life of Penance”, The Nationalist and Munster Advertiser, Dec. 5, 1925.
↑3 ”1956 Centenary Year of Father Mathew, Matt Talbot”, The Catholic Northwest Progress, April 20, 1956.

Don’t drink: Father Mathew’s temperance tour in Pittsburgh

Father Theobald Mathew, Ireland’s 19th century temperance priest, visited Pittsburgh in July 1851 during a two-year American tour. Cork-born Michael J. O’Connor, who eight years earlier became the first bishop of the new Catholic dioceses in Western Pennsylvania, hosted the itinerant from July 13 to July 30 at the ecclesiastical residence.

O’Connor “set the example to his flock by solemnly receiving the pledge from the hand of the venerable ‘Apostle of Temperance’ and adding his name to the list of those who were already enrolled in the good cause,” The Pittsburgh Catholic reported.[1]”Father Mathew”, The Pittsburgh Catholic, July 26, 1851. O’Connor established the newspaper in 1844. The secular Pittsburgh Daily Post described the bishop kneeling to receive the pledge as “a glorious spectacle.”[2]”Father Mathew: Most Interesting and Edifying Proceedings”, Pittsburgh Daily Post, July 22, 1851.

It also was an extraordinary turn for O’Connor, who like other U.S. Catholic prelates had been skeptical of Mathew’s methods and reputation years before his American tour. Part of the reason was Mathew’s “easy fraternization with Protestants,” according to Catholic author and lecturer Michael J. Aquilina.[3]”Pittsburgh Takes the Pledge”, The Pittsburgh Catholic, Aug. 5, 2005, quoted, and Aug. 12, 2005. Written by and adapted from Aquilina’s April 17, 2005, Lambing Lecture, Holy Spirit … Continue reading O’Connor characterized his own temperance efforts as being “on a more religious basis than it is in Ireland. The pledge is administered before the altar.”[4]Quinn, John F., Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America, University of Massachusetts Press, Boston, 2002. p. 158 and Note 13, p. 228. Quote from … Continue reading

His was not the first or only effort to dry the city. “The temperance movement was probably as characteristic of Pittsburgh morality as any reform and possessed more interest and dramatic vigor than most. A number of local temperance societies had been organized before 1830, but in that year the various societies formed a union and undertook a real campaign.”[5]Baldwin, Leland D., Pittsburgh: The Story of a City, 1750-1865. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1937. p. 249.

Soon after becoming bishop in 1843, O’Connor traveled to Europe to recruit religious personnel to build the new see. In Ireland, he accepted an invitation to speak at one of Mathew’s rallies. “It was probably that personal encounter with Father Mathew and the eyewitness experience of his work that changed Bishop O’Connor’s attitude,” Aquilina wrote. The Kerry Evening Post reported in August 1845 that O’Conner offered grace before the meal of “a great fete” for Mathew hosted by the Teetotalers of Killarney.[6]”The Rev. Theobald Mathew In Killarney, Festivities On The Lake”, Kerry Evening Post, Aug. 23, 1845.

Father Mathew visited Pittsburgh in July 1851.                            Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

An estimated 8,000 people took the temperance pledge during Mathew’s two-week Pittsburgh crusade. The Catholic and secular press coverage did not detail the demographics of those vowing to reject alcohol, though presumably most were men. The reporting also did not reference the famine-fleeing Irish who began arriving in the years immediately before Mathew’s visit. By 1851, about 12,000 Irish immigrants lived in Pittsburgh and neighboring Allegheny City, just over 20 percent of the area population. Victor Walsh has asserted:

Many of Father Mathew’s pledge signers were the Irish-Catholic laboring poor who believed that he possessed supernatural powers that would protect them from evil and misfortune. Passive and capricious, they flocked to the crusade more out of deference to Father Mathew than out of a commitment to organized personal reform. As a consequence, the cause quickly faded in its appeal after Father Mathew’s departure.[7]Walsh, Victor A., “Across ‘The Big Wather,’ The Irish Catholic Community of Mid-Nineteenth Century Pittsburgh”, The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Vol. 66, No. 1, … Continue reading

Mathew spoke on topics other than temperance, such as charity. “Never did we hear the claims of the poor, or the affluence of the rich, more ably or eloquently enforced; in some cases the effect was thrillingly impressive,” the Daily Post reported.[8]”Father Mathew”, Pittsburgh Daily Post, July 29, 1851.

After Mathew departed, the Catholic offered this editorial assessment:

He has been successful in Pittsburgh beyond the most sanguine expectations of the friends of total abstinence. During the time of his stay, the number of those who have visited the Bishop’s residence for the purpose of taking the pledge from him has been steadily increasing, and he was compelled to prolong his visit beyond his original intention … We sincerely believe that the benefits produced by the visit will be permanent. … If [Mathew’s estimate that only 4 percent of those who take the pledge later “violate the promise”] is correct, his exertions in the cause of temperance have been an inestimable blessing to those amongst whom he has labored. It is not difficult to get men to take the pledge when it has become the rage to take it in a particular locality; but to get men to adhere to the pledge when the temporary excitement is passed, is a difficulty which our most zealous temperance reformers in this country have found it impossible to overcome.[9]”Father Mathew“, The Pittsburgh Catholic, Aug. 2, 1851.

The editorial lamented “how few” of the 6,000 Pittsburghers adhered to the temperance pledges they made in 1841, when frequent anti-drink parades marched to “whip up enthusiasm” for the campaign begun in 1830.[10]Baldwin, Story of a City, p. 250.

Four decades after Mathew’s departure, another Irish-born priest, Rev. Morgan Sheedy, operated “a large temperance society” from St. Mary of Mercy Catholic Church in the city’s “Point” district, then an Irish ghetto. He regularly protested against liquor licenses and claimed “the number of saloons was greatly lessened and the liquor traffic brought under restraint.”[11]Sheedy, Rev. Morgan M., “Ten Years on Historic Ground: Early and Later Days at the Pittsburgh Point.” Western Pennsylvania History Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, April 1922, p. 141.

Aquilina noted that Alcoholics Anonymous, created in the 1930s, “would have been unthinkable without Father Mathew’s advance guard,” while in Pittsburgh his “good effects cascade down the generations and down the centuries.”[12]”Pittsburgh Takes the Pledge”, The Pittsburgh Catholic, Aug. 12, 2005,

See more of my work on the Pittsburgh Irish.

Pittsburgh, circa 1850s.                                                                    Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

References

References
↑1 ”Father Mathew”, The Pittsburgh Catholic, July 26, 1851. O’Connor established the newspaper in 1844.
↑2 ”Father Mathew: Most Interesting and Edifying Proceedings”, Pittsburgh Daily Post, July 22, 1851.
↑3 ”Pittsburgh Takes the Pledge”, The Pittsburgh Catholic, Aug. 5, 2005, quoted, and Aug. 12, 2005. Written by and adapted from Aquilina’s April 17, 2005, Lambing Lecture, Holy Spirit Byzantine Church Hall, Pittsburgh, Pa. Bates, John C., The Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania: Its Origins, Establishment, and Resurrection. The Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, 2020, p. 352.
↑4 Quinn, John F., Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America, University of Massachusetts Press, Boston, 2002. p. 158 and Note 13, p. 228. Quote from O’Connor letter to Paul Cullen, Jan. 10, 1842.
↑5 Baldwin, Leland D., Pittsburgh: The Story of a City, 1750-1865. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1937. p. 249.
↑6 ”The Rev. Theobald Mathew In Killarney, Festivities On The Lake”, Kerry Evening Post, Aug. 23, 1845.
↑7 Walsh, Victor A., “Across ‘The Big Wather,’ The Irish Catholic Community of Mid-Nineteenth Century Pittsburgh”, The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Vol. 66, No. 1, January 1983.
↑8 ”Father Mathew”, Pittsburgh Daily Post, July 29, 1851.
↑9 ”Father Mathew“, The Pittsburgh Catholic, Aug. 2, 1851.
↑10 Baldwin, Story of a City, p. 250.
↑11 Sheedy, Rev. Morgan M., “Ten Years on Historic Ground: Early and Later Days at the Pittsburgh Point.” Western Pennsylvania History Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, April 1922, p. 141.
↑12 ”Pittsburgh Takes the Pledge”, The Pittsburgh Catholic, Aug. 12, 2005,