The church was originally dedicated to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, partly due to the French Jesuit Order once affiliated with the shrine.

Today, an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary Help of Christians is dedicated within the church, being the Marian title consecrated in 1924 as Patroness of the entire Chinese motherland.

The church building was heavily damaged in 1966, at the opening of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards from Beijing vandalized the cathedral, tearing down its spires and ceiling, and smashing its roughly 300 square meters of stained glass.

Powerless to resist, Bishop Aloysius Zhang Jiashu knelt at the altar and prayed until he was dragged away – for the duration of the Cultural Revolution, he was "sent down" for labour, repairing umbrellas and washing bottles.

In 2002, Wo Ye, a Beijing-born artist, and Father Thomas Lucas, a Jesuit from the University of San Francisco, began a five-year project to replace the cathedral's stained glass windows.

However, this is not the cathedral in the original book Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, who attended the school at the Anglican Holy Trinity Church in Shanghai.