St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church was established in 1845 at the northwest corner of Lake Avenue and Ridge Road. In 1873, the church opened a school. Many of the children in Gross Point attended school at St. Joseph, where they were taught by nuns from Milwaukee's School Sisters of St. Francis until 1981; the Archdiocese of Chicago closed the school in 1986, but parish families reopened it a decade later. The German language was frequently used in the classrooms up until World War I, when the school abandoned this practice due to anti-German feeling in the United States. Meanwhile, because masses also were only celebrated in German, English-speaking Catholics opened a second parish in the area. St. Francis Xavier Church began in 1904 and would be merged with St. Joseph Parish in 2019.