Patrick C. Keely designed around six hundred churches in his long career, the Church of the Sacred Heart in Malden being his last project. He died in 1896, five years before this church was consecrated. As Keely was in his eighties, the Malden church may have been the work of someone in his office. Although it bears no resemblance to the majority of Keely's work, which was in the Gothic style, the Church of the Sacred Heart is an Italian Renaissance design, the style used for his Church of Immaculate Conception (SE20) in the South End of Boston built thirty years earlier.