Father Matthew Riordan established St. Patrick's Catholic Church in 1866 at the corner of Fourth and Linden. The first St. Patrick was a two-story structure with a school on the first floor and the church located on the second floor. From its inception, education has been a significant part of St. Patrick's mission.

St. Patrick Church and St. Patrick School served through three yellow fever epidemics, the great depression, and two world wars. St. Patrick School closed in 1950 due to a falling base of Catholic students whose families had begun to migrate to suburbs in the east. In 1954 the Paulists accepted responsibility for St. Patrick Church, and by 1966 what had been a missionary focus to the southeastern United States shifted to a focus on the immediate neighborhood surrounding the church.

As the neighborhood surrounding St. Patrick became poorer and the needs of the immediate community became more basic in nature, the church became increasingly more creative on how to meet people's needs. Education once again resurfaced as a primary outreach focus for the parish, as did affordable housing and home ownership.

To increase home ownership, St. Patrick Church created St. Patrick Community Development Corporation (CDC) in 1985 to produce affordable housing. To date, it has constructed 8 homes, renovated and resold several others, and is under contract to construct 20 more homes in the Peabody-Vance neighborhood.

In the late sixties, Sister Florence developed an outreach educational ministry called "Smart from the Start" that consisted of visiting neighborhood homes to model parenting skills and teaching techniques to parents of pre-schoolers.

By 1970, the circa 1925 St. Patrick School building had become a neighborhood community center called St. Patrick Center. The Center served as the neighborhood hub for educational and recreational activities for children and adults, including organized sports leagues, after school programs and adult literacy classes. A MIFA food pantry, AA meetings and other socially responsible programs were based in the center.

In 1999, St. Patrick demolished the structure known as St. Patrick Center and replaced it with two mobile buildings to house the educational programs. In 2002, The Assisi Foundation donated $600,000 to rebuild the Center with a focus on literacy. As a result of that generosity, the Catholic Diocese committed to construct the first "new" elementary Jubilee School. Both the Center and the School begin classes and programs in the fall of 2003.