The tensions reached their highest point when the Armenians announced the decision to build a seminary at Akhaltsikhe and Shahqulianis supported them.

Thanks to his work, Pope Pius IX allowed him to found a new Georgian religious congregation on May 7, 1859, in Constantinople and also a typikon there.

Upon his arrival he founded the congregation of the Servites of the Immaculate Conception and began to celebrate the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy in Old Georgian.

In addition to theological work, his congregation and school have also had a significant influence upon the Georgian language, its grammar, literature, and history.

Their pupils were also taught using excerpts from Georgian national poet Shota Rustaveli's The Knight in the Panther's Skin.

The expansion of the Servite congregation caused a new monastery and publishing house to also be built at Montauban (France) in that same decade.

The Servites and their schools were accordingly able to continue the work of St. Gregory of Khandzta and laid the foundation for the subsequent mass revival of Georgian-medium education in Orthodox form by Prince Ilia Chavchavadze.

According to Father Christopher Zugger, nine Servite missionaries from Constantinople, headed by Exarch Shio Batmanishvili, came to the newly independent Democratic Republic of Georgia to permanently establish Catholicism of the Byzantine Rite in Old Georgian there, and by 1929 their faithful had grown to 8,000.

[7] Their mission came to an end with the arrests of Exarch Shio and his priests by the Soviet secret police in 1928, their imprisonment in the Gulag at Solovki prison camp, and their subsequent murder by Joseph Stalin's NKVD at Sandarmokh[8] in 1937.