Catholic efforts to respond to Protestant claims continued until the late 19th Century, when historical developments resulted in a sharp decline in the popularity of the Apostasy model among critics of the Church. In 1870, the newly unified Kingdom of Italy annexed the remaining Papal States, depriving the papacy of its immediate political authority. Because the historicist view largely depended upon an understanding of the pope as a temporal leader (citing scriptural claims that the Antichrist would wield both spiritual and political power), this approach gradually fell out of favour in Anti-Catholic discourse.