Tenement women up with sick children heard Talbot singing hymns in the middle of the night when he rose at 2 a.m. to pray. His mother confided to her daughters that she often awoke in the night to see Talbot praying with his arms extended penitentially in the form of a cross. He prayed during his lunch break and, whenever work paused, while others chatted, he prayed hidden behind the lumber piles. After work, he rushed to the nearest church to pray some more. Sundays he attended Mass after Mass and was proud that on a couple feasts of the Virgin, by dint of being in churches where several were being said at various altars, he could claim to have honored her by hearing twenty-one Masses.
Any addiction is by nature terribly self-centered.
At first Matt Talbot can be said to have simply changed his addiction from drink to asceticism. Not a style that even most saints find appealing, the pitiless attack on the body of certain desert fathers and other ascetics nonetheless sometimes proves a successful route into the heart of God. There is ample proof that it succeeded in Talbot's case. And in fact, all Talbot's money, beyond the rent of the tenement room and the barest of necessities, either became quiet charity to other workmen struggling to support families or went off to works of the Church, particularly the missions. Blustering Sanctity To know God and his Church better, this barely literate man added to a prayer life worthy of those early Irish monks, exhaustive reading from theology, papal encyclicals, the lives of the saints, and the Church's teaching on such social issues as the rights of workers to a just wage.