The abbey was however suppressed in 1874 by plebiscite during the Kulturkampf, and the community of Mariastein went into exile.
The Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart came to the United States in 1876 following persecution of German Catholics during the Kulturkampf.
After the defeat of the revolutionaries the university was refounded in 1834 and was able to attract quite a number of Catholic students from Germany, Austria and Switzerland who were fleeing the Kulturkampf.
The rivalry between the Little Russian and the Ukrainian identity which intensified in the period prior to World War I had the character of a local Kulturkampf and terminological war.
During the Kulturkampf, the monastery and the church were closed down; however, they were opened again once the Prussian Empire resumed normal relations with the Roman Catholic Church.
St. Florian was settled by Roman Catholic German immigrants who fled Germany during the Kulturkampf persecutions of Catholics.
In the 19th century with the rise of liberalism, nationalism and Otto von Bismarcks Kulturkampf repressions and Germanisation against Poles as well as organised resistance by Polish population followed.
On October 12, 1897, he entered the noviciate of the German Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), which then was located in Bleijenbeek (Netherlands) due to the expulsion of the Jesuits during the Kulturkampf of the German Reich.
However it is suspected that its donation was an attempt to rebuild bridges with the Holy See following the kulturkampf campaign against Roman Catholicism that had been mounted by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
The Kulturkampf struggle against the Catholic Church and the Catholic southern German states started almost simultaneously with an extensive campaign of Germanisation in the Greater Poland lands formerly belonging to the Polish Crown.
The Catholic anti-liberalism was led by Pope Pius IX; his death in 1878 allowed Bismarck to open negotiations with Pope Leo XIII, and led to his abandonment of the Kulturkampf in stages in the early 1880s.
The abbey was secularised twice, in 1792, because of the French Revolution, and in 1874, as a result of a conflict between the state and the Roman Catholic Church known as Kulturkampf, after which the monks were obliged to seek refuge first in France, at Delle, and then, when in 1902 they were expelled as a result of legal changes in France, for a short time at Dürrnberg near Hallein in Austria, and finally in Bregenz, also in Austria.
The former Schloss Hain in Düsseldorf-Unterrath was established under the name of Kartause Maria Hain (Maria Hain Charterhouse) as a Carthusian monastery in 1869, where despite the threats of the Kulturkampf in the 1880s and of World War II, it survived until 1964, when the site was required for the expansion of Düsseldorf Airport and the monks were forced to leave.
In connexion with the developments of the Kulturkampf which resulted from the "Falk Laws," he wrote several treatises: e.g. on "The Attitude of the German State Governments towards the Decrees of the Vatican Council" (1871), on "The Prussian Church Laws of 1873" (1873), "The Prussian Church Laws of the years 1874 and 1875" (1875), and "The Prussian Church Law of 14th July 1880" (1881).