11 - Mission animator in Europe

One of Daniel Comboni’s main characteristics as a missionary of Africa has been his missionary animation in Europe, which greatly stressed the universality of the Church and its universal project of salvation.
He travelled along the roads of Europe to involve the whole Church in his Plan to ‘Save Africa with Africa’.
In forming his missionary priests and sisters in Verona, he made the Church of Europe aware of its missionary nature. He contacted politicians and all kinds of influential people of society to obtain support in his battle against slavery. He sought out financial cooperation to keep his projects going and published a missionary magazine (‘Gli Annali del Buon Pastore’: today’s ‘Nigrizia’) to form a missionary conscience in the Church.

From his Writings:
“As I found myself all alone, without the financial help and means needed for the realisation of the Plan, with the permission of my superiors, of his Eminence Card.
Barnabò, Prefect of Propaganda, and of Rev. Don Nicola Mazza, I was bound to travel for 3 years through Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany and especially Austria, trying to constantly learn as much as possible about the foreign missions and their institutions, which in France and in Ireland are very well organized.
Everywhere I tried to widen my knowledge and to obtain, by clearly explaining the importance of the work I was to undertake, support and financial means. I was greatly helped in this by his Eminence Card. Barnabò, by other ecclesiastical and secular eminent persons and especially by the prophetic words of our incomparable Pius IX who, in September 1864, addressed these words to me, words which deeply struck me: “Work as a good soldier of Christ for Africa.”
Letter to the Cologne Society, 1877, Writing no. 4800.