Evelio Menjivar-Ayala’s next option, maybe his only one, was to risk a more desperate gambit.
After two days in detention, Menjivar, his brother and two cousins paid a mordida — a bribe — to get released. Then, by arrangement with a trafficker, they stuffed themselves into the trunk of a car driven by an elderly American. When they felt the car stop and heard the man crank up the music on the radio, it would be their signal to remain still and silent.
That is how they got past the teeming port of entry at San Ysidro, Calif., between Tijuana and San Diego. The four young men spent hours in that trunk before reaching Los Angeles, where Menjivar’s sister and a new life were waiting. In a mountainous village in El Salvador, his mother, who had been lighting prayer candles for their safety, offered up a Mass of thanksgiving.
Undocumented, knowing no English and with only a spotty ninth-grade education, Menjivar grew into adulthood doing pretty much any job he could get — construction, janitorial work, painting — sometimes at the mercy of bosses who knew his dicey legal status meant he would not dare to complain about dangerous working conditions and wages that weren’t paid.
But he moved forward with a conviction that God had a path in mind for him, though he had yet to discern what it was to be.
As Menjivar told me his story one day, I suggested that, surely, there must have been times when he doubted Heaven’s hand. “No, I never put my faith in question,” he insisted. “I mean, faith was what sustained me.”
Today, that go-for-broke 19-year-old who was smuggled over the border in January 1990 is properly addressed as “your excellency.” He has attained a place in the most rarefied ranks of the Catholic Church.
On Dec. 19, Pope Francis named Menjivar one of two new auxiliary bishops for the Archdiocese of Washington, which is home to nearly 700,000 Catholics and encompasses the District and parts of Maryland.
Bishops, according to Catholic teaching, are the direct successors to Christ’s own apostles.
“At a tough time for our church, Bishop Evelio is a sign of hope. He represents something new and something old,” said John Carr, the founder of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. “Decades ago, the Catholic Church was blessed by a generation of priests who came from struggling immigrant families, stayed close to their people, stood with workers and helped immigrants build this church. He represents the church of the future and the best of our past.”
Menjivar’s mother, who, at 88, still cultivates a little farm in El Salvador, traveled more than 3,000 miles to witness his Feb. 21 ordination at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in downtown D.C. “Since my son chose to be a priest, every day I raised my prayers to ask the Lord to enlighten him, but I never dreamed that He would choose him as his bishop,” Catalina Ayala told the Catholic Standard. “God heard the prayers of a humble mother.”
Thought to be the first Central American-born bishop in the United States, Menjivar stands out among the church hierarchy. At 52, he is more than a decade younger than the increasingly geriatric average for U.S. Catholic bishops. And he still has the stocky build of a man who is no stranger to physical labor.
However, it is he — not they — who represents what the church is becoming. The growth in the nation’s Catholic population over the past decade has come almost entirely from Latino immigrants, according to the latest U.S. Religion Census. Yet their leadership does not reflect that increasing diversity. The most recent data, compiled by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, shows nearly 9 of 10 of bishops are non-Hispanic Whites.
Menjivar’s ascension also reflects what has been deemed “the Francis effect,” a more inclusive, less judgmental direction in which the first Latin American pontiff has tried to steer the church. Francis has not made significant changes in doctrine during his decade on the throne of Saint Peter — on, say, lifting the ban against the ordination of women as priests or allowing priests to marry, both of which roughly 6 in 10 U.S. Catholics believe are overdue. But he has led with a more humble and progressive perspective. He has acknowledged, for instance, that there are circumstances in which divorce can be “morally necessary.”
The pope’s modernizing vision is one that conservative Catholic leaders have resisted. Almost nowhere has that pushback been stiffer than among the bishops of North America. As some of them began agitating in 2021 that President Biden, who goes to Mass weekly, be denied Holy Communion because of his support for abortion rights, Francis commented that he would never refuse the sacrament to anyone. “What must the pastor do?” he said. “Be a pastor, don’t go condemning.”
Francis’s example has also forced many Catholics to recognize that the church has reached an inflection point. To cocoon itself in dogma is to become smaller and less relevant. Its hope for the future, if it is to have one, demands that it become more attuned to the day-to-day struggles and complicated lives of the ordinary people in the pews.
At Menjivar’s ordination, Wilton Gregory, the pathbreaking archbishop of Washington who is the first Black American to attain the rank of cardinal, took note of the life experience that the new bishop brings to the role.
“Evelio, you became a manual laborer as you adapted to your new home in the United States of America. Like countless others before you, you earned your upkeep with demanding work,” the cardinal said. “You know very well the countless gifts that our immigrant brothers and sisters continue to bring to our nation as hard workers.”
There has not been much by way of good news about the church in recent years; Catholics, including me, have questioned why we should continue to believe when so many of our leaders have failed us and divided us. But if there is still a presence of God in the brokenness, I think this new bishop has the right idea of where it can be found.
For nearly seven years, Menjivar has been the pastor of a vibrant melting-pot parish — St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Landover Hills, whose membership is roughly 60 percent Latino and 35 percent immigrants from Africa. Menjivar also has held a number of leadership roles in the archdiocese. Notably, he is the only priest to sit on its seven-member Child Protection Advisory Board, set up in 2002 as a massive — and continuing — clergy sex-abuse scandal began to unfold. The others on the board include a survivor of clerical abuse, a chief of police and lay experts in the child-protection field, whose role is to monitor archdiocesan policies and compliance.
His last day saying Masses at St. Mary’s was July 2. At a reception in the parish hall, the exuberant Cameroonian choir that had rocked the 11 a.m. service presented Menjivar with an outfit made of traditional embroidered toghu fabric. The bishop delightedly pulled the imposing double-cone-shaped miter from his head and slipped out of his vestments to pose for pictures in his new Cameroonian ensemble. “I have always wanted to go to Africa,” he said, “but Africa came to me.” (In September, he plans to make his first visit to the continent; the church is sending him to South Sudan.)
There are other ways in which his parish embraced diversity. Though the Roman Catholic Church does not recognize same-sex marriages and its catechism — the text of what the church deems to be fundamental Christian truths — condemns “homosexual acts” as “grave depravity,” Menjivar notes with pride that gay families are part of the community at St. Mary’s. This year, he said, he baptized one of their children and gave First Communion to three others. “They are persevering here,” he said of the gay parents who bring their children to receive the sacraments. “That says a lot.”
In his final sermon as St. Mary’s pastor, Menjivar lamented that religion is too often used as a cloak for fear and judgment and prejudice. He called for his parishioners to show more understanding of new immigrants, of single parents and families broken up by divorce, of the lonely elderly, of anyone who struggles.
“We cannot say that we love God if we do not love those who are closer to us,” he said. “Empathy, my brothers and sisters. Empathy — putting ourselves in the shoes of others — is to realize our common humanity.”
Every Catholic bishop, when he is selected, chooses what is known as an “episcopal motto” — a Latin phrase, usually taken from scripture — to be placed on his personal coat of arms. Menjivar’s is: “Ibat cum illis.” A quote from Luke 24:15, it means “He walked with them.” It serves both as a reminder of his personal journey — and a vow that he will remain at the side of the downtrodden and those who are in pain.
“When we walk with people, first of all, we’ll listen to them. And this is what Pope Francis is asking us, to listen to people. Listen to people, don’t judge people,” he told me. “If the first approach is to judge people and to condemn people, no wonder the churches are empty. Because our ministry has become gatekeepers and not evangelizers, just gatekeepers. No, we have to listen to and walk with everybody.”
The fifth of seven children, Menjivar was born in 1970 in the Salvadoran hamlet of Carasque near the Honduran border. When he was 9, the civil war that would ravage his country for a dozen years broke out. Carasque, where sympathies were with the leftist rebels against the right-wing government, saw some of the worst of it.
One woman recalled the horror of those days in a 2005 interview with the Nation: “When the army came to occupy us, the men of Carasque hid farther up the mountains so they wouldn’t be drafted against their will. The Guardia took our pigs and chickens and never paid us. If they asked for your ID and you didn’t have it, they beat you. When the Guardia saw a woman walking alone, they would take her up the hill above here and rape her in a group. They would tell her if she talked they’d rip out her tongue.”
Catholic clergy stood up to the brutality — and some became victims. In 1989, just two months before Menjivar arrived in the United States, an army battalion slaughtered six Jesuit priests, along with a housekeeper and her daughter, because they had spoken out against the regime. One of Menjivar’s first acts after becoming a bishop was to celebrate a Mass at Washington’s Sacred Heart Shrine in honor of the feast day of Saint Oscar Romero, a Salvadoran archbishop who preached “liberation theology” and was murdered in 1980 by a right-wing death squad. Over the objections of conservatives in the church who deemed Romero a Marxist, Pope Francis canonized him as a martyred saint in 2018.
Menjivar was 12 when his family was driven out of Carasque. They moved to the larger municipality of El Paraiso, where they were often treated as unwanted outsiders. “It was hard to be refugees in your own country,” he said. “We faced discrimination, the stereotypes of an immigrant.” He attended school only sporadically and was still in third grade at the age of 13.
With a major army garrison nearby, the bloody war raged at their doorstep. The army controlled the land during the day; the guerrillas took over at night. Both were constantly looking to conscript young men. Menjivar’s father urged him and his brother to go north rather than face what would likely be an early death.
That is how he ended up in the trunk of a car headed for Los Angeles with a single change of clothes in his backpack. Two years later, Menjivar moved to Maryland in search of more opportunity. The Washington area has one of the largest Salvadoran communities in the country and is the only metropolitan region where they constitute the greatest segment of the Latino population. The future bishop’s first job in the region was cleaning a UPS warehouse in Laurel.
Around that time, as the war was ending, Menjivar applied for asylum and received a work permit as his application began making its way through an interminable backlog. But while it was pending, he could not leave the country, which meant he did not see his family in El Salvador for seven years. Some he never saw again. All four of his grandparents passed away during that time, and his elder sister died in childbirth.
He worked on learning English and later studied to get his high school equivalency diploma. Menjivar also found a community in two suburban Maryland churches with large Hispanic congregations — St. Camillus in Silver Spring and St. Mark’s in Hyattsville. It was around then that he began to feel stirrings of something he had sensed since childhood, something that Catholics know as “discerning the call to vocation.” As Menjivar put it: “It became more clear that the Lord was calling me.
Among the first whose counsel he sought was Rev. Brian Jordan, the pastor at St. Camillus. “He was a very earnest, forthright, deeply spiritual young man,” Jordan recalls. “And I said to myself, there’s something very special about Evelio.”
Enter Rev. Mark Brennan, who was then the Washington archdiocese director of priestly vocations. He, too, recognized Menjivar as a promising candidate. One of the things that had to be dealt with was the question of his immigration status. As it happened, there was a green-card program for religious workers. And, as it happened, St. Mark’s was in need of a Spanish-speaker to run its youth program. Once the diocese advertised the job and determined there was, as regulations require, no qualified citizen available to take the job, said Brennan, who is now bishop of the Wheeling-Charleston diocese in West Virginia, “We were able to then hire Evelio.” (Menjivar became a U.S. citizen in 2006.)
In 1995, the archdiocese sent Menjivar to St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami, which has a unique bilingual college-level program. He showed such aptitude there that upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he was sent for further studies in Rome, where he received a master’s degree in theology before being ordained a priest in 2004.
Upon his return to Washington, Menjivar moved quickly up the parochial ladder. He had posts at churches in Germantown and Bethesda, as well as St. Matthew’s Cathedral. In 2014, he became pastor of Our Lady Queen of the Americas, a small Hispanic parish near Dupont Circle. Two years later, he took over St. Mary’s in Landover Hills.
Meanwhile, more of his family has moved to the United States. Three of his brothers and sisters live here now. Menjivar’s father died a few years ago; his mother refuses to come for more than a visit. When I asked about her, the bishop’s eyes softened, and he smiled: “She thinks that she’s a farmer. She still grows corn and some other vegetables and it is a pastime. It is something that reinvigorates her. She’s truly a woman of the earth.”
Menjivar is one of three auxiliary bishops in the Washington archdiocese. They report to the cardinal in a role that loosely approximates a vice-presidential one. It can be a first step to running their own diocese — or something much bigger. In 1992, a Jesuit priest named Jorge Mario Bergoglio was ordained auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires; he is now known as Pope Francis.
Typically, bishops are ordained near the end of their careers. The fact that Menjivar and the archdiocese’s other new auxiliary bishop — Argentine-born Juan R. Esposito-Garcia, 49 — are relatively young suggests that there are great things ahead for them. “There’s some that are like rising stars in the morning. They shine forth early,” said Brennan, who noted that he himself was just shy of his 70th birthday when he became auxiliary bishop of Baltimore.
But if Menjivar is the face of something fresh in the church, his passion speaks to one of its traditions. There is a long-standing solidarity between the Catholic church and the labor movement, one that goes at least as far back as the late 1800s and the emergence of a breed of collar-wearing reformers who became known as “labor priests.” Many were roused by an 1891 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII affirming that workers should have the right to fair wages, decent treatment and to form unions and strike. They turned Catholic social teaching into activism.
Over the decades, that agenda receded, but in the Francis era, the ties between the church and labor unions have again become closer. Menjivar counts as his own mentor the foremost of today’s labor priests, Father Clete Kiley of Chicago, who is chaplain to the Chicago Federation of Labor and a senior adviser to the Unite Here International Union, which represents hotel, casino and food service workers, among others.
Menjivar remembers one rally where his own zeal got the best of him. The weather was freezing, and a man who worked in a meat locker told Menjivar how many hours he had spent in temperatures like that without proper protection. “And then I said, ‘Well, I’m going to show solidarity with you.’” he recalled, laughing. “So I took off my jacket and it was so cold I barely could finish my talk.”
In April, Menjivar returned to St. Camillus, his old parish, to preside at its third annual memorial mass for construction workers — laborers such as he had been when he began attending Mass there back in the 1990s. Instead of his miter, he wore a hard hat, identical to those that had been placed on 40 empty chairs, alongside a red rose. Each commemorated a death, the majority of them Latino, that had taken place in the Greater Washington area over the past year. Swinging a vessel of incense, he blessed the helmets — and the memory of those workers.
Sometimes, the bishop told me, those who labor at the lower rungs of the ladder, especially immigrants, worry: Am I doing the right thing in standing up to exploitation? Am I asking too much? It is his mission, he says, to support them as they fight for their dignity and their worth, and to reassure them that humbly accepting maltreatment “is not good, that is not what God wants.”
So, what does Menjivar believe that God wants from him? “I can walk with people,” he said. “I think we are called to walk with people without much pretension. Yes, we are leaders in the faith, but at the end, that is to walk with people, listen to them, be there for them.”
And in doing so, a man who arrived in this country in the trunk of a car might be able to help the church find its own path, one that leads to a more hopeful and inclusive future.
