This panel explores the multifaceted response of American Catholic leaders and institutions to the urban crisis of the 1960s and 70s. In his seminal work, Parish Boundaries, John McGreevy notes that amidst postwar suburbanization, the Catholic share of the white population in northern cities steadily climbed. By the 1960s, Catholics emerged as the single largest demographic group in northern cities. The Catholic Church was also the largest private landowner in northern cities and the largest sponsor of community organization efforts nationwide. Catholic priests, nuns, politicians, union workers, and homeowners thus played an outsized role in the history of public housing, urban renewal, highway programs, and race relations, and in their responses to the urban crisis helped create an alternate vision for the city. In St. Louis, Missouri, Monsignor John Shockee and the parishioners of St. Bridget’s Parish founded an ecumenical, multi-racial, and metropolitan organization to rehabilitate housing for low-income homebuyers being driven from the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. Similarly, in the Bronx, New York, Catholic entities focused on community organizing and the rehabilitation of abandoned housing, collaborating with national coalitions, and advising the Ford and Carter administrations to reinvest in urban communities. And in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, St. Vincent’s Hospital – the oldest and most prominent Catholic hospital in New York City – established a Community Medicine Department, which pioneered outreach to the homeless and homebound elderly. By highlighting Catholic responses to the urban crisis in these three local settings, this panel argues that the urban crisis of the 1960s and 70s cannot be understood without reference to the Catholic institutions and leaders who aimed to save the city and serve its neediest residents.