It currently serves some 3,500 families and conducts services in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Latin.

[2] St. Joseph's was founded in 1853 when Father James Croke rented a two-story building on the corner of Church and Chemeketa streets that had been a Masonic hall.

[3] The Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a Roman Catholic teaching religious institute arrived in 1863 and bought the building.

A church historian has noted that the then pastor Leopold Dieleman, "threw enough holy water on the building to put out a fire" and quotes Father Dieleman as saying, "The devil that day had danced his last polka in the building".

[4] The following year St. John Evangelist Church opened on a rise of ground known locally as "Piety Hill".