Pope Leo’s first Filipino appointment is Infanta’s prelate

Pope Leo XIV, on May 16, made his first appointment of a Filipino bishop, naming Fr. Dave Dean Capucao as the new shepherd of the Prelature of Infanta, according to the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) News.

The 59-year-old Bicolano priest was appointed at noon (Vatican time) or 6 pm (Philippine time) to the joy of his flock. He was born in Camarines Sur on September 25.

"We entrust his pastoral ministry to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the loving intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary," said the Prelature of Infanta on its social media page.

He will be the fourth prelate of Infanta. A prelature is smaller in size, similar to a diocese.

Capucao replaces retired Bishop Bernardino Cortez, who resigned in July last year when he turned 75, the required age for bishops to offer their resignation, under Ecclesiae Sanctae, the 1966 apostolic letter by Pope Paul VI.

Thirty years ago, Capucao was ordained a priest for the Infanta prelature on Oct. 3 and immediately assigned founding pastor of a village parish in a poor area of Aurora province, where he served for six years.

In 2000, he attended the Catholic University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, now Radboud University, where he earned a master’s degree in intercultural and interreligious theology two years later.

For four years, from 2002 to 2006, the bishop-elect worked as a junior researcher at the university’s theology faculty. That was when he also began work on a dissertation on religion and ethnocentrism, which he defended in 2009, according to CBCP News.

While in the Netherlands in 2006, Capucao also did parish work. A year later, he was appointed a member of the pastoral team of Saint Ludger Parish in the area of Lichtenvoorde and Winterswijk. 

Capucao also holds a doctorate in sacred theology from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

In 2011, he returned to the Philippines and served as a formator at the prelature’s St. Joseph Formation House (SJFH) in Quezon City. Four years later, he was appointed rector of SJFH and also taught at various universities and theological institutions.

He wassked with being superintendent of the Catholic Association of Schools in the Prelature of Infanta (CASPI) by Cortez in 2021.

The bishop-elect serves as president of the Center for Empirical Studies on Spirituality, Theology, and Religion–Asia (CESSTREL-ASIA) and is also a member of the prelature’s Presbyteral Council and other international organizations, including the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion (NOSTER) and the International Society of Empirical Research in Theology (ISERT). 

In his new assignment, 127 kilometers east of the Philippine capital Manila and consisting of around 373,000 church members, he is expected also to face challenges brought about by typhoons and poverty.