The story begins in 1861, almost three decades before the present church was finished. A priest, Fr George Dunn, bought a parcel of land behind Roker Avenue and built a Catholic school and chapel on the site. For the local Catholic community living on the north bank of the Wear, that small chapel became their place of worship: the closest they had had since the Reformation. England was still in the early decades of the Catholic Emancipation era, and the construction of Catholic churches in northern industrial cities was a slow, often contested undertaking. The north Sunderland community made do with what they had, knowing they would eventually want something larger and more permanent.

The push for a proper church came in 1873 when Fr Jules de Floer arrived in the parish. De Floer began the fundraising and planning that would, sixteen years later, produce St Benet's. The architects chosen were the practice of Dunn, Hansom and Dunn: Archibald Matthias Dunn, his son Archibald Manuel Dunn, and Edward Joseph Hansom. The firm specialised in Gothic Revival Catholic churches across the north of England, and they brought that idiom to Monkwearmouth in 1889 with a building that was solid, vertical, and unmistakably Catholic in a Sunderland still dominated by Anglican parishes. The opening of the new church in 1889 was the largest single Catholic architectural statement on the north side of the Wear since the Reformation.

From 1900 the parish was handed to the Redemptorist congregation, the missionary order founded by Alphonsus Liguori in eighteenth-century Naples and known for its emphasis on parish missions, retreats, and preaching to working-class communities. The Redemptorists were a good match for Monkwearmouth, a working district of shipyards and terraced streets, and they served the parish continuously for 111 years. The church became a hub for Catholic life in the surrounding streets: First Communions, marriages, requiems, the round of feast days, the small daily Masses. In 2011 the Redemptorists withdrew, leaving the parish back in the hands of priests of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, the diocese that had originally entrusted it to them a century earlier.

Today a single priest serves three Catholic churches in Monkwearmouth: St Benet's, Sacred Heart and St John Bosco, and St Hilda's. The Mass times are staggered because no priest can be in two places at once. St Hilda's celebrates Saturday vigil at 6 pm. Sacred Heart and St John Bosco has Masses at 4:30 pm Saturday and 9:30 am Sunday. St Benet's has its single Sunday Mass at 11 am, the late morning slot that gives parishioners time to walk over after breakfast and gather in the same Gothic Revival space where their grandparents and great-grandparents worshipped. The compromise speaks to the broader decline of clerical numbers across the Catholic Church in England, but it also speaks to the resilience of a parish that began with a chapel behind Roker Avenue and has kept its doors open ever since.