File:HOLY TRINITY CHURCH AND CAPUCHIN FRIARY (FATHER MATHEW QUAY IN CORK)-144612.jpg

English: I was not happy with the interior shots.

Holy Trinity Church, also known as Father Mathew Memorial Church, is a Roman Catholic Gothic Revival church and friary on Fr. Mathew Quay, on the bank of the River Lee in Cork. It belongs to the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and is the only church dedicated to Father Theobald Mathew.

The building's listing in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage describes it as a "Regency Gothic-style church with Gothic-Revival portico", and it is "one of the first large churches in the south of Ireland to be built in this style." Construction of the church began in the early 1830s but stalled shortly before the Great Famine. It would only be completed in 1890, in time for the centenary of the birth of Fr. Mathew. The church features several noteworthy stained glass windows, including three by Harry Clarke's studio and a large memorial to Daniel O'Connell.

Theobald Mathew (1790–1856) was an Irish Catholic priest and teetotalist reformer, popularly known as Father Mathew. He was born at Thomastown, near Golden, County Tipperary, on October 10, 1790.

He received his schooling in Kilkenny, then moved for a short time to Maynooth. From 1808 to 1814 he studied in Dublin, where in the latter year he was ordained to the priesthood. Having entered the Capuchin order, after a brief period of service at Kilkenny, he joined the mission in Cork.

Statues of Mathew stand on St. Patrick's Street, Cork, by J. H. Foley (1864), and on O'Connell Street, Dublin, by Mary Redmond (1893). There is a Fr. Mathew Bridge in Limerick City, named after the temperance reformer when it was rebuilt between 1844 and 1846.[5] The Capuchin church in Cork, Holy Trinity, stands on Father Mathew Quay and was commissioned by him.

Mathew visited the United States in 1849, returning in 1851. While there, he found himself at the center of the Abolitionist debate. Many of his hosts, including John Hughes, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, were anti-abolitionists and wanted assurances that Mathew would not stray outside his remit of battling alcohol consumption. But Mathew had signed a petition (along with 60,000 Irish people, including Daniel O'Connell) encouraging the Irish in the US not to partake in slavery in 1841 during Charles Lenox Remond's tour of Ireland.[

In order to avoid upsetting these anti-abolitionist friends in the US, he snubbed an invitation to publicly condemn chattel slavery, sacrificing his friendship with that movement. He defended his position by pointing out that there was nothing in the scripture that prohibited slavery. He was condemned by many on the abolitionist side, including the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass who had received the pledge from Mathew in Cork in 1845. Douglass felt "grieved, humbled and mortified" by Mathew's decision to ignore slavery while campaigning in the US and "wondered how being a Catholic priest should inhibit him from denouncing the sin of slavery as much as the sin of intemperance." Douglass felt it was his duty to now "denounce and expose the conduct of Father Mathew".