On 11 November 1417 the Great Western Schism ended with the election of one pope accepted by almost all of western Christendom. The thirty-nine terrible years of disunity were over, and the members of the Council of Constance had good reason to rejoice. Among those at Constance who did not live to see this happy day was Cardinal Franciscus Zabarella, who had died in late September and who up to his death had been considered a leading candidate for the papacy. During the council he had indicated in several sermons and addresses how much the unity which they had sought for so long meant to him and his contemporaries. He expressed these ideas and sentiments on the occasions when, little by little, various groups were united with and took their places at the Council at Constance in the years 1415–1416, reintegrating the fragmented western church. These sermons reflected the hopes and dreams of the members of the council.

The Schools of Christian Doctrine taught the fundamentals of Catholicism, and reading and writing, to a very large number of boys and girls in sixteenth-century Italy. Numerous laymen and laywomen gave up their holiday leisure in order to teach in these schools. The Schools of Christian Doctrine were a significant feature of the Catholic Reformation, a broad movement of Catholic renewal that began before 1517 and whose major initiatives were not necessarily responses to the Protestant Reformation. New religious orders, missionary activity, the founding of institutions to care for the sick, poor, and homeless, and a general effort to teach and preach to the laity more effectively characterized the Catholic Reformation. Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and others provided leadership and were canonized in later centuries. Scholars have given all of the above a good deal of attention, but probably only specialists are aware of the Schools of Christian Doctrine.

From the publication of Peter Heylyn's History of the Sabbath in 1636 to the most recent studies of this doctrine, sabbatarianism has been treated as an important and controversial issue in the post-Reformation period. These studies portray sabbatarianism as a puritan innovation, which that party introduced in an effort to reform the church from below, having failed to covert the English church to presbyterianism. This doctrinal innovation has been described by Professor Collinson as “something more than a certain ethical and social attitude to the use of Sunday: it implies the doctrinal assertion that the fourth commandment is not an obsolete ceremonial law of the Jews but a perpetual, moral law, binding on Christians; in other words, that the Christian observance of Sunday has its basis not in ecclesiastical tradition but in the decalogue.”

As with other professions, the ministry has a long record of excluding women from its ranks. Virtually all women, unlike all men, have been categorized as laity, although they have failed even to achieve that designation on occasion. George Bernard Shaw, in The Doctor's Dilemma, observed that “every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” Certainly this has been the case among lay women aspiring to become members of the clergy. But Shaw recognized in his play, Major Barbara (1905), a new kind of Christian minister, one who contested her business-tycoon father on a significant contemporary issue of how best to relieve poverty in Britain. Indirectly Shaw was paying tribute to the influence of Catherine Booth (1829–1890), co-founder of the Salvation Army, who recognized women's powers of intellect and innate equality and elevated them to clerical parity with men.

In April 1895, the Pittsburgh Catholic, the official diocesan newspaper, proudly reported: the “progress” of Catholicism “is conspicuously marked in this diocese by the steady increase of churches to accom[m]odate the faithful”.This glowing assessment was prompted by news that the city's first Slovak Catholic church, Saint Elizabeth's, had been organized. Saint Elizabeth's came into existence because Slovak lay Catholics had taken it upon themselves to found a national church. If the diocese defined “progress” as an increase in the number of churches, Pittsburgh's Slovak immigrants certainly contributed to that progress during the next decade. By 1909, lay-initiated movements had led to the formation of three more Slovak Catholic churches in Pittsburgh.