Dalit cardinal elected head of Indian bishops’ body
Indian Catholics have hailed the appointment as a historic step
Cardinal Anthony Poola — India’s first Dalit cardinal — was elected Saturday as the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, a body uniting the country’s three main rites.
The Feb. 7 appointment highlights the significant role that Dalits — who occupy the lowest rung in India’s traditional caste hierarchy — play within the Catholic Church in India. But while almost two-thirds of India’s Catholics are believed to be Dalits, they are under-represented in the priesthood and episcopate.
Indian Catholics hailed Poola’s appointment as a historic step following centuries of discrimination against Dalits within the Church.
Bishop Sarat Chandra Nayak, president of the CBCI’s Commission for Castes and Other Disadvantaged Groups, told AsiaNews: “The president is elected by secret ballot, according to long-established statutes. By choosing Cardinal Poola for his merits, the bishops have sent a clear and prophetic message to those who still carry with them the logic of castes (both as perpetrators and victims): Dalits and tribal people can be leaders in the Church at all levels.”
Poola, the 64-year-old Latin Catholic Archbishop of Hyderabad, was chosen to succeed the Syro-Malabar Archbishop Andrews Thazhath at a Feb. 4-10 CBCI meeting in Bengaluru, the capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Thazhath had led the assembly of bishops since 2022.
Poola, the first Dalit to serve as CBCI president, takes up the role at a time of rising fear among India’s Christians, following a series of attacks before Christmas.
A CBCI press release said: “With his election as president of the CBCI, Cardinal Poola Anthony assumes leadership of the Catholic Church in India at a crucial moment, bringing with him decades of pastoral experience, administrative leadership, and a strong commitment to the Church’s mission in service of faith, justice, and human dignity.”
The CBCI issued a document in 2016 calling for “Dalit empowerment” in the Church. The text acknowledged that “practices of untouchability do exist in the Church” and set out policies to eliminate discrimination.
The document estimated that around 12 million of India’s 19 million Catholics were Dalits. It said that Dalits only accounted for 1,130 out of the country’s 27,000 priests (4.2%) and 4,500 out of 100,000 religious (4.5%).
The first Dalit Catholic bishop, Bishop John Mulagada, was appointed in 1977. In 2016, only 12 of India’s 180 bishops were Dalits (6.6%).
In March 2025, India’s Supreme Court agreed to examine a petition alleging bias against Dalit Catholics in a parish in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
The petitioners, from a parish in the village of Kottapalayam, in the Latin Rite Diocese of Kumbakonam, said they had experienced discrimination within the Church from members of the upper caste.
The CBCI, established in 1944 and based in New Delhi, brings together India’s Latin Rite, Syro-Malabar, and Syro-Malankara bishops to take common action on issues affecting the wider Catholic Church in India.
The CBCI’s presidency informally rotates between India’s three sui iuris Churches, and other senior roles are carefully balanced.
Also elected Feb. 7 were the Syro-Malankara Archbishop Thomas Mar Koorilos as the CBCI’s first vice-president and Syro-Malabar Archbishop Mathew Moolakkatt as second vice-president. Archbishop Anil Couto, the Latin Catholic Archbishop of Delhi, was re-elected as the CBCI’s secretary general.
Anthony Poola was born in Poluru, a village in India’s southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, on Nov. 15, 1961, to a Catholic father and a Hindu mother. He was ordained a priest of the Latin Rite Diocese of Cuddapah in 1992.
From 2001 to 2003, he studied for a master’s degree in pastoral care and attended a theology course at Loyola University Chicago, while serving in the city’s St. Genevieve parish.
In 2008, he was named Bishop of Kurnool, his birth diocese. In 2020, Pope Francis appointed him Archbishop of Hyderabad, the capital of the south-central Indian state of Telangana. The Hyderabad archdiocese serves around 117,000 Catholics, out of a total population of almost 15 million.
In 2022, Poola became the first Dalit to be appointed to the College of Cardinals. He was also the first cardinal to be a native speaker of Telugu, a language spoken by almost 100 million people, mainly based in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, the Latin Catholic Bishop of Daltonganj, told UCA News Feb. 8 that Poola’s election as CBCI president would “send a strong message to Christians of Dalit origin that the Church upholds the dignity of everyone.”