The prelate has been active on several fronts since his early years in office. On July 5th 1876, he founded the first Italian catechetical magazine, Il catechismo cattolico. In 1877, he promoted the reopening of the seminary in Upper Italy, announced the first pastoral visit, in 1878 he promoted the recognition of the relics of Saints Antoninus and Victor, and in 1879 he called the first diocesan synod. Also, in 1879 he founded the Institute for deaf-mutes in Piacenza, and in 1880 the diocesan newspaper La verità. He was one of the promoters of the theological magazine Divus Thomas, in 1881 he inaugurated the Opera dei Congressi and promulgated the new diocesan catechism, and also founded the Istituto Sordomuti in Piacenza.

An attentive and charitable personality, he immediately took an interest in the problems of the marginalised and emigrants, creating the Patronage Association for Emigration to establish a congregation of priests to safeguard the faith and spiritual care of those who left Italy in search of fortune. In this has been inspired by Francesco Zaboglio (Campodolcino, Valtellina Superiore, 1852 – Como, 1911), whom he met in the minor seminary of S. Abbondio in Como, a priest who later left the secular clergy and joined the Clerici Regolari of Somasca. Having travelled to America in 1886 to visit emigrant relatives, Zaboglio understood the problems related to migrants and, back in Italy, he exposed them to Scalabrini, inviting him in writing to set up an Institute to spiritually assist migrants. Scalabrini prepared a project and at the beginning of 1888 instructed Zaboglio to set up the first mission in New York, where the first priests from Piacenza arrived.

On July 9th 1887 he set up a Committee for the protection of migrants, which was to take the name ‘St. Raphael Society’ and created local committees for the protection of migrants in Rome, Genoa, Turin, Florence and Milan. He set up a group of scholars in catechetical and didactic methodology; this led him to choose Piacenza as the venue for the first Italian Catechetical Congress, on September 24^th, 1889.In 1887 Scalabrini founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo, known as Scalabrinians, for the care of Italian emigrants. The commitment on this front was realised on March 19th 1889, when he handed the crucifix to Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini who, with the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, went to the United States to assist Italian emigrants.

Meanwhile (1888-1889) Zaboglio worked for the numerous groups of Italian emigrants stationed in Missouri, Minnesota and Ohio. Despite some disagreements over the management of the missions, the work of evangelization continued. In September 1892, Zaboglio opened a mission in the port of Genoa; in the winter of the same year, he set sail for São Paulo in Brazil. A document preserved among Scalabrini’s deeds in the Piacenza Diocesan Historical Archives also highlights a project to help emigrants in Africa.

In 1892 Scalabrini established the Opera of Sant’Opilio for poor clerics, and in 1894 he opened subscriptions for the restoration of Piacenza’s Cathedral.

On October 25th 1895, after the male branch, he founded the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo to assist migrants; five years later, in 1900, he welcomed into the diocese and approved the constitutions of the Sisters Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, founded by Clelia Merloni, and gave them the task of flanking the Scalabrinians in assisting migrants.

As a bishop he always felt united with his missionaries: on July 18th 1901 he left Genoa for what was his first overseas pastoral visit to Italian emigrants in the United States of America.

During the trip, seized by the news of President McKinley’s assassination, Scalabrini cancelled all celebratory ceremonies in all Italian Catholic communities, and urged the Italian community not to join those who preached rejection of authority. He wishes in this way to counter the image of a violent people, attributed to the Italians, presenting them as peaceful and patriotic, united in the grief of the Americans. On October 10th, he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1902, he supported the publication of the weekly Il lavoro, and in 1903, aware of the terrible situation of the mondine, he founded the work ‘Pro Mondariso’ in Piacenza.

On June 13th 1904, he left for his second pastoral visit to the Americas, to the missionaries and Italian communities in Brazil.

In 1905, a few months before his death, he proposed to the Holy See the establishment of a Central Commission for all Catholic emigrants, based on the idea of Zaboglio, who had meanwhile returned to Italy after a serious accident and retired (1900). The organization would later develop into the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People