Roman Catholic missions entered North Africa soon after the conquest of Algeria. Lyons, in France, became a great centre of missionary activity. It is the head-quarters at the present day of a powerful French Roman Catholic Missionary Society—that of the Holy Ghost and of the Sacred Heart of Mary—which of recent years has been doing a good work in Portuguese Angola and on the coast region of the Congo, and also in Senegambia and German East Africa. In 1846 missionary enterprise in Roman Catholic Austria decided to take advantage of Muhammad Ali’s conquest of the Sudan to push its way into the heart of Africa through Egypt. In 1846 these Austrian Catholic missionaries chose Cairo as their starting point, and this mission continued to work in the Egyptian Sudan until the uprising of the Mahdists. Most of the readers of this book have heard of the adventures of Father Ohrwalder and the nuns who escaped from the clutches of the Khalifa in 1896. This mission, amongst other philological studies, illustrated the interesting Bari language of the upper White Nile, and did excellent work in countries so remote as Kordofan and Sennār. Italian priests—before the disasters which befell the colonial enterprise of Italy in 1896—worked amongst the Galas of Abyssinia. Roman Catholic missions (French) had been begun in Tigré (N. Abyssinia) about 1830. In 1847, at the request of the Prince of Shoa, Pope Pius IX sent a Roman bishop-missionary, Monsignor Massaia, to Shoa, who remained there some years, and may be said to have started Italian mission work in that field.