Pope Francis has named a new archbishop of the archdiocese of Karachi in Pakistan, on Feb.11, after he accepted the resignation of Cardinal Joseph Coutts of Karachi.
Cardinal Coutts stepped down upon reaching the canonical retirement age of 75 in July 2020.
Pope Francis named Bishop Benny Mario Travas of Multan, 54, as the new archbishop of Karachi.
Bishop Travas was born on Nov. 21, 1966 and ordained a priest on Dec. 7, 1990. He was appointed apostolic administrator of Multan in 2014 and was nominated its bishop on May 29, 2015.
He was consecrated bishop on Aug. 15, 2015.
He obtained his licentiate in Canon Law from the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome.
He later served as rector of the St. Pius X Minor Seminary in Karachi, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Karachi, and vice president of the Catholic Board of Education.
He was also a professor of Canon Law at the National Catholic Institute of Theology in Karachi. He is the chairman of Caritas Pakistan.
Karachi, the capital of Sindh province in southern Pakistan, has an estimated population of more than 16 million people, making it the world’s 12th-largest city.
There are an estimated 197,700 Catholics in the Archdiocese of Karachi, which was initially established in 1948 under the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Bombay, India.
It was elevated to an archdiocese in 1950.
In January, the charity Open Doors named Pakistan, the world’s fifth-most populous nation, as the fifth-worst country in the world in which to be a Christian.