At 83, Father Martin still speaking to pain of addiction

We alcoholics drink because we can't NOT drink.

I must not make myself a part of the destruction of someone I love.

Drug your conscience and see where your behavior goes.

What are you worth?

But why did he drink?

"Oh, a thousand reasons," Father Martin says. "The point is I crossed the line until I could not NOT drink."

Growing up in a Hampden rowhouse, the seven Martin children were exposed to drinking. Father Martin's 81-year-old brother, Edward Martin, says their father drank on Friday, payday. The rest of the week, James Martin, a machinist by trade, was fine, but Friday nights were not pleasant. Three of the four boys developed drinking problems.

"They say children of an alcoholic get used to the idea of drinking," says Edward Martin, who lives in Georgia. He was spared the attraction. "I never had the money to buy the stuff."

His older brother, Joseph, was clearly the popular one, winner of oratory contests at Loyola High School, the gift of gab. He grew up to be a devoted and enormously generous priest - with a quirk to his personality, his only living brother says. In a crowd, Joseph dominated the conversation with his humor, "as if he felt inadequate to socially bond with people or be comfortable in their presence unless he was entertaining them. He doesn't converse; he gives a humorous lecture."

In 1964, Father Martin crossed paths with Lora Mae Abraham, a mother and housewife from Havre de Grace. Her drinking was out of control and threatened to upend her marriage to Tommy Abraham, the owner of a Greek restaurant in Aberdeen. Days after a lost weekend at Rehoboth Beach, Del., Abraham agreed to attend a lecture at the Johns Hopkins University. Former Iowa Gov. Harold Hughes was to talk about his alcoholism. Filling in for the governor, however, was a Catholic priest from Baltimore. Mae looked for the exit.

Hello, I'm Joe Martin, and I'm an alcoholic. ... Then, the Catholic priest told her, a Southern Baptist, that she wasn't to blame for her drinking. That she wasn't evil.

"He removed the shame from me," she says. "It changed my life forever on."

A lifelong friendship and partnership were born. Mae took everyone she knew with a drinking problem to hear Father Martin's chalk talks. But despite his sobriety and popularity, he was suffering another crisis by the end of the 1960s.