When the Collegium Josephinum has been founded in 1880, it should train excluding younger generation for the religious order. Many religious orders had furnished comparable "Juvenate" in which the pupils also lived. However, Bismarck's cultural war had not allowed at that time to open the school directly on Prussian ground. Thus the Redemptoristen made way in the Dutch Vaals which lies immediately on the border to Aachen. The school company began with 22 “Juvenisten” here on the 2nd of May, 1880.
In 1920 the move of the Collegium Josephinum from Vaals to Bonn occurred. Here one had been able to acquire the "teaching institution and reformatory Saint Joseph at the height" which the Bonn "Catholic association pursued" since 1871 "for neglected boys", had to put, indeed, in the years of war because of financial problems.
After also a bigger number of the Patres had finished a teaching post study, the Collegium Josephinum received in 1930 the rank of an accredited high school with the right to lend even high school diplomas.
As for all Catholic facilities the Nazi era also meant a phase of the systematic impediments of the ecclesiastical education work for the Collegium Josephinum. Interventions in the teaching contents, disadvantages for the teachers worldly also in the meantime and chicaneries for the parents who sent her sons on this school were in the agenda. Even if the number of the Juvenisten decreased as a result a little bit, the school company did not come for succumbing.
On the 18th of January, 1940 came the state instruction that the school is immediately to be removed, so that a field hospital can be furnished. Most pupils left Bonn and went back to her home towns. But for 60 Juvenisten there were no schools in the parental sphere. 40 of them moved around in the Redemptoristenkloster in which they could live. Together with 20 remaining ones which had found accommodation privately in Bonn they visited Beethoven or Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Gymnasium. Up to the seizure of the cloister by the confidential state police in the Maundy Thursday, the 10th of April, 1941, existed this "Small Juvenat". In 28. December, 1944 met an aerial mine the building removed few weeks before and damaged it hard.
Still on the day of the American invasion in Bonn, the 9th of March, 1945, some Patres remained in the town took the cloister and school again in possession. Nevertheless, during the following months several hundred American soldiers used the not destroyed parts of the arrangement as an accommodation. Bit by bit appeared on a row of the scattered Juvenisten and the lessons could be taken up on the 1st of September, 1945 with about 30 pupils as a makeshift again.
Since Easter 1950 the first 30 external pupils visited the CoJoBo. The boarders with 189 boys still had a clear majority. But in the very growing school the external caught up in next decade and since 1965 they form a majority becoming more and more clearly. Though with about 350 pupils one still counted to the small Bonn high schools, but now one had become a school for Bonn and his northwest environs and not more only one school in Bonn. The decisions for 2 (1960) and then 3-line removal (1972) of the Collegium Josephinum followed the big inquiry in town and environs and let the pupil's figures till 1980 on about 800 rise.
The wish of children and young men, the school and her boarding school with the aim of the order entry to visit, had already clearly decreased in the middle of the fifties. This led to some tensions if internal pupils had to leave boarding school and school at that time because of the job of her originally stated intention to want to become an order priest immediately.
The father Welzel who had taken care during many years in vain of an architectural enlargement of the school experienced in 1969/70 the determining breakthrough: The Cologne archbishop, cardinal Joseph Höffner, accepted not only the financial support of the diocese for a complete new building of the CoJoBo, but also stimulated the foundation of a young secondary school in the sponsorship of the order, then in 1976 with P. Of Dr. Johanne Steinmetzler was opened at the head. After countless negotiations with diocese, the country North Rhine-Westphalia and city of Bonn the school new building originated in 1978 – in 1980 for high school and secondary school.
Relieved by the adversities of decades of spatial interim solutions, rejuvenates by a substantial number of new teachers and female teachers and under the management of the managers father Dietger Demuth (from 1980 to 1993), father Peter Niesemann (secondary school rector since 1985) and Peter Billig (since 1993) experienced the CoJoBo since 1980 till this day 25 happy years. The drastic decline of the pupil's figures in Bonn in the eighties passed the CoJoBo without a trace. In 1990 the high school of the CoJoBo lay with the pupil's figures in second place of 21 Bonn high schools at that time. The offer of an equipment oriented in the Christianity which young people educate in a secondary school and a high school would like to form and advance to the faith, appears in the variety of the today's society an element which meets a need of many parents and is persuaded of his importance of the Redemptoristenorden.