He organised conferences all over Europe to share his idea, as well as speaking with Arnold Janssen and Catholic congregations already engaged in missions in Africa.

With the founder's death, his congregation entered a precarious phase: the Mahdist War prevented missionaries from continuing their mission to Sudan.

Francesco Sogaro, Comboni's first successor, transformed the society into a congregation of simple vows in 1885, but older members did not accept the decision because they believed that religious practices would distract the missionaries from the active apostolate.

[8] Vatican II, which had invited religious institutes to rediscover the charism of their founders, urged the two separate congregational groups to seek the way of unity.

As a result, on 2 September 1975, together in the town of Ellwangen in southern Germany, the two groups celebrated the general chapters which decided and ratified the meeting of the two institutes.

[9] They are present in Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Spain), Africa (Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, South Sudan,[10] Sudan, Togo, Uganda, Zambia), in the Americas (Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru), and Asia (Philippines, Macao, Taiwan).

[1] Eleven men have alleged that members of the order sexually abused them during the 1960s and 1970s when they were boys at a Comboni Missionaries minor seminary, St Peter Claver College, in Mirfield, England.

The Inquiry, quoting this response, clarified that they had "never asked that any institution delay meeting with victims and survivors nor did it do so in respect of the Comboni Order".

[18] In June 2021 Bishop of Leeds Marcus Stock, in a meeting with victims attended by Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols and Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, Adjunct Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (responsible for dealing with clerical sexual abuse cases), apologised for sexual abuse of boys at the Comboni Missionaries' St Peter Claver College in the 1960s and 1970s.

[19] On 21 and 22 March 2023 people who had been abused as teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s at Mirfield met in Rome with Pope Francis and leaders of the Comboni Missionary order.