Of all the churches affected by the Gregorian reform movement few were more notable than the monastery of Montecassino. Not only the latter's own writers but even Pope Gregory vii himself described it as famous throughout Christendom. In southern Italy it was undoubtedly the most important single institution of the Latin Church. Founded by St Benedict in 529, by the eleventh century it was exempt from normal ecclesiastical jurisdiction and was the centre of a franchise free from the obligations of lay society. Under the abbacy of Desiderius of Benevento (1058–87) it enjoyed its golden age of political, intellectual and artistic influence. Its monks filled many south Italian bishoprics, and a number of them were promoted to be cardinals. Three times in sixty years, in 1057, 1087 and 1118, a Cassinese monk attained the see of St Peter. Desiderius himself was elected to succeed Gregory vii in 1087, with the title of Victor iii.

Current historical opinion inclines to the view that the reign of Charles i was a time of increased stringency for the English Catholic community. There may have been a relaxation for upper-class Catholics with court connexions, but there was also a great increase in the number of those sequestered for recusancy and a higher level of recusancy fining. Dr K. J. Lindley suggests that this policy of increased severity in fining may even have been an important factor in inclining the recusant population towards neutrality during the English Civil War. The significance of financial persecution is seen in a rather different light in analyses of the Interregnum, however. Here, despite the fact that pecuniary mulcts were higher than they had ever been before or were to be again, the treatment of Catholics has been portrayed as a continuous movement towards greater toleration only brought to an end with the fall of the Protectorate.

‘There were about ten million Catholics in the British dominions, and, properly considered, Queen Victoria was one of die great Catholic powers of Europe. She reigned over more Cadiolics man some Catholic Sovereigns’. This was the claim of an Irish member of parliament in advocating equality of Catholic education with Protestant at the great meeting held by Cardinal Cullen in the Marlborough Street ‘Cathedral’ in Dublin in January 1872. The meeting was intended to demonstrate the unanimity of laity and clergy in the demand for denominationalism in the National Schools system and the rejection of mixed schools. On the same day the opposition to Cullen's policy was expressed by die Radical John Roebuck in an address given in Sheffield, in the course of which he argued that the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 had merely been a dissembling attempt by the Liberals to dupe Dissenters and Radicals and bind diem to Mr Gladstone. It had not brought religious peace to Ireland. ‘Were not the whole body of the Cadiolics, headed by Cardinal Cullen, still determined upon attaining their old end, which was supremacy of the Cadiolic Church in Ireland?’ At the Dublin gathering Cullen quoted J. S. Mill on die danger of a state monopoly in education and roundly condemned the government's policy of mixed education as a scheme which die Protestant Archbishop Whately had admitted was the only way of weaning the Irish from the abuses of popery. The organ of Irish nationalist opinion, The Freeman's Journal, rallied support by denouncing Lord Hartington for resisting the logic of die argument that Irish education of Cadiolic children should be handed over to ‘the priests and people of Ireland’: English Protestants were insincere in favouring a denominational system for Scotland while treating Catholic education for the Irish as subversive of civil and religious liberty.