History :

St. Patrick Parish in Bloomington embraces an area that includes the southern part of Victoria County and the northwestern section of Calhoun County. Until Fr. Peter M. Baque came from Edna in 1915 to celebrate Mass in a small bungalow in Bloomington, Catholics of the area attended Mass in one of the churches in Victoria. The bungalow was succeeded by an abandoned schoolhouse and that in turn by a former pool hall as the site for Sunday Mass.

In 1916 a funeral parlor was bought from J.E. Ryan of Victoria with help from the Catholic Church Extension Society and remodeled into a church by the Warburton and Skarda families. Even after the remodeling, some of the caskets in the original containers were used for the Altar and in various other ways. When Bishop Arthur J. Drossaerts dedicated the Church in honor of the Sacred Heart on January 13, 1920 he pointed to the caskets as a poignant reminder of death.

The building was used until 1942 when it had to be abandoned after being severely damaged by a hurricane. During that year Bloomington was officially attached as a mission of Our Lady of Sorrows Parish in Victoria. In 1943 the Trinitarian Fathers took over the administration of Sacred Heart Church. In the following year a new building was erected at the corner of Third and Rail streets. The twenty-four by fifty foot structure, considered “much too large for the congregation” at the time, was soon crowded beyond capacity.

Final recognition of the area came in 1959 when, on September 15, the original Sacred Heart Mission was established as St. Patrick Parish. A member of a prominent Catholic family donated the building of a new church complex located on Highway 185 in honor of his parents. The facility is a contemporary Spanish mission-styled structure. The furnishings for the Church came from the people of the parish.