The Roman Catholics settled on the southern slopes of Castle Hill and near the Danube around the mosque of the Ottoman governor (beylerbey) Sokollu Mustafa Pasha (1566-1578) which survived the war.

[1][2] In 1689 the head of the Cameral Administration of Buda, Johann Stephan Werlein asked the Franciscans of Bosna Argentina, who had a house in the Víziváros district, to take on the pastoral care of the Catholic Slavs who lived in the area.

The guardian of the Víziváros friary served as parish priest but actual pastoral care was entrusted to a Franciscan administrator who lived in the Tabán district.

[5] Tabán quickly became the most densely populated quarter of Buda in the first decades of the 18th century in spite of the several natural disasters and epidemics that hit the district.

[8] The slow pace of the construction shows that the financial resources of the parish were limited, although several citizens had left donations for the church.

A new Baroque facade and a tower was built by Matthäus Nepauer, a masterbuilder originally from Vienna, who worked on several churches in Buda at the time.

At the time of the unification of Buda and Pest in 1873 the chancel and the northeastern side of the church was surrounded by a narrow churchyard, enclosed by the neighbouring houses, and there was a small square in front of the facade.

The new patron, the Municipal Authority of Budapest built a large new parish house on Attila körút by the side of the church for 48.000 forints in Neo-Renaissance style in 1877.

The level of Szarvas tér was lowered in 1894, and the parish office building with the sacristy was demolished to make way for the new road which was named Attila körút.

The ancient Tabán parish was reduced to its core area, and lost a large part lying to the south of Gellért Hill.

The districts of Kelenföld and Lágymányos were originally sparsely populated but the urbanization of the area made necessary to establish an independent parish because the majority of the parishioners already lived there.

The reduced parish covered the Tabán area, the northern slopes of Gellért Hill, the southern part of Naphegy and the hilly neighbourhoods around Sas-hegy.

Only a small group of houses was preserved and the context of the church changed fundamentally as the dense urban grain of the historic neighbourhood was replaced by a new park and wide thoroughfares.

A bomb hit the western side of the building; the roof, the spire and the obelisk of the pediment were destroyed, the liturgical furnishings and the altars were extensively damaged or lost.

In the course of a thorough reconstruction in 1959-1960, the building was fitted with a reinforced concrete frame structure and buttresses, the vaults were strengthened, the main facade was simplified and the entrance porch was demolished.

In 1962-1964 new roads and a traffic interchange was built in connection with the construction of the new Elisabeth Bridge nearby which radically changed the urban surroundings again.

Due to the disappearance of the Tabán district, the church became somewhat isolated, and the parish had a decreasing population in the last decades of the 20th century (numbering about 6000 people in 1982).

The urban context of the church has been changed fundamentally in the 19th-20th century with the widening of Attila út and several phases of large-scale demolitions.

An outbuilding for the parish office occupies the central part of the original narrow churchyard on the north and the west which is not open to the public.

According to a description from 1756, the church had a richly decorated main altar with several statues and an oil painting of Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

The saint is depicted in royal robes with a crown and a broken wheel, her usual attributes at her feet, and one of the angels is holding the palm of martyrdom.

It was built after the Great Tabán Fire around 1815 in a similar Late Baroque style to the main altar and all the other important items of church furniture.

The altarpiece is flanked by a pair of decorative Corinthian columns and two statues, Archangel Michael slaying a serpent and Saint Emeric of Hungary.

A putto is pouring water on the flames while an angel is holding a veil with the inscription: "Allmächtigster Gott mit Vunder schützest du uns änzelne Hauser erschone O Gnädigster in Zukunft auch unsere mit Bruder In Cen DIVMIn ras CIanICa Die 5 Sept", a prayer to God to protect the houses and the people of the town in the future.

[20] A concert was held on 29 October 1835 in the church by Johann Nepomuk Batka performing Bach's organ works and his own compositions which was enjoyed by a large audience.

[21] The ornate Empire style cases, painted bluish green with a faux marble effect, are decorated with Ionic columns, half-pillars, urns and gilded ornaments; the Eye of Providence is set in the pediment of the central aedicule.

The stone baptismal font is one of the few artefacts that survived the Great Fire, it was made by Johann Kugler in 1749; the wooden cover is decorated with a sculpture of Jesus baptized by John.

The Lamentation of Christ, an 1890 fresco by Lázár Nagy on the western wall of the apse, was destroyed at the same time when the semicircular window of the former oratory was reopened.

The stained glass window of the organ loft was commissioned by the parish priest, János Leimeter in 1911 for the memory of his mother who died that year; it depicted a coat-of-arms with a black flag and a dedicatory inscription.

The ornate Neo-Baroque wood panels added by János Leimeter in the early 1910s were also eliminated, and a new table altar and lectern was installed.