The Dominican monastery in Minsk was founded in 1600 by Sophia Wolkiewicz Sluzkowa, a noblewoman, voivode's wife of Cesis in what is now Latvia, and recent widow of Krzysztof Sluzka, the voivode of Polish Livonia. She invited the Dominicans from Vilnius. In 1604 the szlachta - the Polish-Lithuanian gentry - imposed a peculiar 'hoof tax' on horses to fund construction, and the family coats of arms went up on the cornices. The original buildings were wooden. Stone construction began in 1615 after Peter Tyszkiewicz, Count of Lahoysk and voivode of Minsk, donated land in perpetuity at the High Market. The brick church and monastery were finally complete by 1640. Most of the funding came from Minsk nobility, layered in over decades through wills, donations, and bequests recorded in fund bonds preserved for centuries in the monastery archive.

The church was a three-aisled basilica without a transept, combining Renaissance proportions with the swelling decorative vocabulary of the Eastern Baroque. The facade used an unusual axial composition where symmetry was defined not by openings but by the spaces between them. The interior held 12 side altars and one main altar, with frescoes, stucco rocaille, and a trompe-l'oeil painted Corinthian background behind a depiction of St. Thomas Aquinas writing with a golden pen. Some altars were brick with carved columns; others were wood, gilded and painted. There were altars to St. John of Nepomuk, the Immaculate Conception, St. Dominic, the Crucified Christ, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Jack, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Barbara dressed in a carved wooden gown, St. Jude Thaddeus in a silver robe, the Mother of God, and the patron himself. The 24-voice organs sat in a music choir above the entrance.

When the Roman Catholic Diocese of Minsk was created in 1798, the apostolic nuncio Lorenzo Litta designated the Dominican monastery as the temporary residence of the bishop. It served that role until the failed November Uprising of 1830-1831 against Russian rule, after which the monastery was abolished by decree. The church remained open as the Minsk parish church under secular clergy. In 1845, Russian authorities adapted the former monastery as a Catholic seminary. After the failed January Uprising of 1863-1864, repression intensified: in 1870 the seminary became barracks and the church was converted into an Eastern Orthodox church. By the 20th century the building had been demoted further still, ending up as a fire station before placement under state heritage protection on July 5, 1926. Each repurposing chipped away at the original Catholic identity until very little of it remained intact.

Soviet troops occupied Minsk in July 1944, and the monastery complex took heavy damage during the fighting. The Belarusian SSR received German reparations in 1945 to fund restoration work, and conservation began in the late 1940s. The work was abandoned in 1950 when Soviet authorities ordered the entire complex demolished by explosives. The reasons were ideological and urbanistic: the new Stalinist plan for central Minsk required clear sightlines and grand spaces, and a Catholic Baroque ensemble preserved as a state heritage monument did not fit the design. The foundations and cellars survived underground. They sit today beneath the corner of Internatsionalna and Engels Streets, near where the Palace of the Republic now stands. Belarusian Catholic communities, both Roman and Greek, are a minority in an Orthodox-majority country. Their architectural heritage in Minsk is mostly underground, mostly unrecorded, and mostly waiting.