The early Limerick Jesuit school had every disadvantage that Counter-Reformation politics could throw at it. It ran in private houses, occasionally under the literal noses of the authorities - at one strange moment they actually set up in a property owned by the Lord Deputy of Ireland himself, conveyed to them by influential friends. Pope Pius V's formal excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570 made things worse. The Anglican Bishop of Meath, Hugh Brady, was sent to Limerick with a Royal Commission to find and expel the Jesuits. Edmund Daniel was forced to flee to Lisbon; when he returned in 1572 he was immediately arrested, found with incriminating documents, and executed in Cork in 1572 - a Jesuit martyr who barely figures in modern Irish memory. Yet the school he had helped to establish, against all odds, kept some form of existence through the Cromwellian invasion, the Williamite wars, and the Penal Laws. It finally closed not for confessional reasons but because the Jesuit Order itself was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.

The Society of Jesus was restored in 1814. In 1859, at the invitation of Bishop John Ryan of Limerick, the Jesuits returned to the city. Their first premises were on Hartstone Street; in 1862 they bought Crescent House and three adjacent buildings on the Georgian Crescent at the south end of O'Connell Street, vacated by the Russell banking family. The school was named Sacred Heart College and rededicated in 1868 - the first church and school in Ireland devoted to the cult of the Sacred Heart. But everyone in Limerick called it Crescent College, or simply 'the Crescent', because of where it stood. In 1879 a Crescent student, Charles Doyle, took first place in Ireland in the first nationwide Intermediate Examinations. He became, eventually, a Judge of the King's Bench. The school was on its way.

By the late 1960s the world had changed and the Crescent was at a crossroads. Pope Pedro Arrupe, General of the Society of Jesus, was urging the Jesuits worldwide to return to St Ignatius's original vision - schools for the poor and underserved, not fee-paying institutions for the comfortable middle class. The Irish Minister for Education, Donagh O'Malley - himself an old boy of the Crescent - opened negotiations with the Jesuit Provincial, an old classmate. Crescent would become a comprehensive school, free, with state funding, open to all classes. The Limerick Trades Council, suspicious of Jesuits, complained in the press about the unsuitability of upper-class educators running a comprehensive school. The Jesuit Board argued back that the Society's pre-suppression schools in Limerick had themselves been free; the new arrangement was a return to roots, not a departure. The Georgian buildings on the Crescent were declared structurally unsound in 1971. Land was bought at Dooradoyle in 1973 - on the site of the demolished MacMahon family seat. The Sacred Heart name was dropped. The school became 'Crescent College Comprehensive SJ', and the Crescent Shopping Centre opened beside it shortly after, taking its name from the school.

In 1978 Crescent became the first Irish Jesuit school to go co-educational, with a ratio of three boys to one girl. Along with Gonzaga in Dublin, it was the first Irish school to offer transition year. In the 1980s, in collaboration with the new National Institute for Higher Education in Limerick - now the University of Limerick - Crescent students could take computer and technology courses at Leaving Certificate level. In 2011 a team from the school won a European Space Agency competition by building a working satellite that fit inside a soft-drink can, representing Ireland in Norway and finishing third out of fourteen countries. On the rugby pitch, Crescent is one of the big-five Munster schools, with twelve Munster Schools Senior Cup wins between 1947 and 2022. The girls' hockey team took the Kate Russell All-Ireland Hockey Championship in 2015. The boys' basketball team won the 2017 All-Ireland. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes - the great memoir of Limerick poverty - references the school. So do the alumni lists of two of the country's biggest companies: Google Ireland's John Herlihy and Microsoft Ireland's Paul Rellis both passed through Crescent classrooms.

The Sacred Heart Church on the Crescent in central Limerick - the spiritual home of the school for 150 years - closed in 2006, ending a century-and-a-half association. The Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a Traditionalist Catholic order, eventually bought the building. The school's House of Prayer and Spirituality is now at the Jesuit residence in Dooradoyle, where a handful of Jesuit priests live alongside the Jesuit Refugee Service. The headmaster has been a layman since 2001. Above the 1973 foundation stone of the modern campus sits a much older stone - rescued from a 17th-century building on Castle Lane in central Limerick, inscribed with the IHS monogram and the date 1642, the year Garret Barry's Irish Confederate army took Limerick. The Jesuits put the old stone above the new building deliberately. Forty-six decades after William Good translated the catechism in secret, the project of Jesuit education in Limerick is still recognisably the same project.