John Bojanic was born on January 26, 1890, in Vrisnik on the Island Hvar, in Dalmatia, Croatia (now part of Yugoslavia). He received his elementary education in his home town and his high school and college training in Lokrun and Dubrovnik. In 1906, he entered the Dominican novitiate in Dubrovnik where he took Innocent Maria as his religious name and made his first profession of vows on December 15, 1907. After completing his philosophical and theological courses at the Dominica n House of Studies in Dubrovnik, he was ordained a priest on August 10, 1913.

Father Bojanic's first assignment was to the Dominican High School in Bol as a professor of German and Greek. In 1917, he became a military chaplain with the Austro-Hungarian Army. Captured by the Germans on the Albanian front, he spent ten months in Italian prison camps before he was able to return to work in his Province. In 1919, he was appointed professor of languages at the Realka State College in Split.

In 1921, George Cardinal Mundelein, Archbishop of Chicago, asked the Dominican Province of St. Joseph to assume responsibility for Holy Trinity Croatian Parish in Chicago, then under the temporary care of the Benedictines from St. Procopius Abbey. The Master of the Order assigned Father Bojanic to the pastorate at Holy Trinity. He arrived in Chicago on February 4, 1922, the first Dominican to take up permanent residence in the Archdiocese. Father Bojanic served a pastor of Holy Trinity for forty-four years, during which time he was able to put the debt-laden parish on sound financial footing and to provide a center of worship and Catholic education for the Croatian people in the Pilsen neighborhood that enabled them to retain the best of the traditional art and culture of their homeland.

In 1966, Father Bojanic retired to St. Dominic-St. Thomas Priory in River Forest, Illinois, where he spent his days in reading and prayer and in counselling his many former parishioners who stopped by for a visit In early November, 1980, his health began to decline rapidly, and he had to move to the Oak Park Convalescent and Geriatric Center, not far from his Dominican community in River Forest, for special care. He died there of heart failure on November 26, 1980. Following services at St. Dominic-St. Thomas Priory in River Forest, and at Holy Trinity Church in Chicago, he was buried in the community plot at All Saints Cemetery, Des Plaines, Illinois, on November 29.