Mario E. Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Washington, has been named Bishop of Houma-Thibodaux by Pope Francis, a move that was praised.

“With great joy, I thank God for Pope Francis’ appointment of Bishop Mario E. Dorsonville as the fifth Bishop of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux,” Louisville Archbishop Shelton Fabre said on Twitter recently.

The Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux covers 3,500 square miles in Louisiana and has a population of almost 260,000 people, a recent U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) report said. More than 80,000 of those people are Catholic.

Dorsonville, 62, was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1960 and was ordained to the priesthood in November 1985; the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington website said. After earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1981 and a bachelor’s degree in Sacred Theology in 1985 at the Major Seminary of the Archdiocese of Bogotá, he came to America in the early 1990s to pursue a doctoral degree in ministry at the Catholic University of America.

Dorsonville succeeds Fabre, who led the Houma-Thibodaux diocese before being sent by the pope to the Archdiocese of Louisville in Kentucky in March 2022.

Since 2015, Dorsonville has served as an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Washington, a recent Catholic News Agency report said. From 2019 to 2022, he was the chairman of the USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services Committee.