Catholicism, as both institution and culture of popular religious beliefs, rituals and social values, played a major role in the changing order of race relations between the Great Depression and the end of the Civil Rights Era. Central to most individuals’ experience of race and other crucial issues at mid-century, such as labor rights and anticommunism, were a variety of competing religious worldviews. Because the Catholic Church united all sides of this struggle under one, highly contested community, it offers a particularly useful vantage point from which to view the role of religion in the struggle for human rights. Nowhere was the Southern Catholic presence more influential than in Louisiana, a Deep South state where Catholics had always been in the mainstream of social and political life. With evidence gleaned from oral interviews, personal papers of prominent lay, clergy, and women religious, as well as periodicals and secondary material, this project examines how individuals, both black and white, responded to the pursuit of human rights in terms of their own religious obligations. On the one hand, the ability of the church to unify a local community and encourage the pursuit of justice among its members allowed for relatively peaceful relationships between the races and helped bring about crucial social changes in South Louisiana. At the same time, however, white Catholic segregationists undermined church authority and contributed to the rise of lay Catholic conservatism, particularly in New Orleans. As much as Vatican II and the rise of sexual politics, struggles over race relations in the church prompted a conservative movement that continues to play a dominant role in both the Catholic life and the social politics of the region.