What makes the site quietly remarkable is that it layers at least three distinct phases of religious use on the same ground, each shaped by the political circumstances of its moment.

The story reaches back to 1235, when a Franciscan friary was founded on the site by Ralph le Porter. That medieval foundation was long gone by the seventeenth century, but the Franciscans had not entirely given up on the location. According to details recorded by N. Donnelly in 1904, a friar named Father Barnwall built a new chapel on or near the old site, probably in the latter years of Charles II's reign, with the intention of returning the Order to its original ground. The timing was precarious. The chapel may not have been finished before James II was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and with the Franciscans compelled once again to withdraw, the building passed to the secular clergy. A 1749 description of the chapel, preserved in Donnelly's account, gives a precise snapshot of what it looked like at that point: the altar-piece, four pillars, and steps were all of Kilkenny marble; the walls carried paintings of the Assumption, St. Peter, St. Thomas, St. Paul, and St. Nicholas; the choir was situated above stairs; and the old dormitory of the friars had been converted into lodgings for priests. There was no vestry. A side altar dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua stood near the pulpit but was already in disuse by that date. The chapel appears on John Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin, marked with a cross between Francis Street and Plunket Street, and by then it served the combined Catholic parishes of St. Nicholas Without, St. Bride's, St. Kevin's, and St. Luke's. In 1833, the Rev. Dr. Flanagan began replacing the old chapel with the present parish church, and the portico was completed during the tenure of Canon McCabe, who later became a cardinal.

The church sits on Francis Street itself, which runs south from the Coombe and is easily reached on foot from Patrick Street or Thomas Street. The building that visitors see today is the 1833 structure rather than the Barnwall chapel, but the site beneath it carries the full sequence, from the thirteenth-century friary through the penal-era Mass-house to the nineteenth-century rebuild. Rocque's 1756 map, available through various digitised archives, is worth consulting alongside a visit, if only to see how the street pattern has and has not changed in the intervening centuries.