An undocumented immigrant now leads West Virginia’s 100,000 Catholics

Pope Leo makes clear Jesus’ words about immigration

The bishops of the Catholic Church are finally starting to live up to the words of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, and one of the new church leaders arrived in the U.S. in the trunk of a car trying to escape persecution in El Salvador.

Washington Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjivar was named by Pope Leo to leader West Virginia’s one diocese of 100,000 Catholics. He is replacing a bishop who made clear that Jesus Christ himself was a refugee and an migrant,

The child Jesus was a refugee in Egypt, fleeing King Herod [Matthew 2:13]. The adult Lord says to us: I was a stranger, and you welcomed me, hungry and you fed me, naked and you clothed me [Matthew 25:35-36]. Our initial concern as Catholics is not the immigrant’s legal status but his human need. We will listen to our Lord and welcome the stranger.

Bishop Mark Brennan, Wheeling-Charleston Diocese, 2023.

The new bishop experienced some tremendous oppression before being permitted to enter the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant before receiving a green card.

Here is his story.

Challenging life

Evelio Menjivar is fortunate to have been given an opportunity to pursue a religious life in America. He was escaping from a horrible country, El Salvador, which is still that way. In fact, it is where the United States is now sending immigrants that it deems to be un-American.

Menjivar is the first United States bishop born in El Salvador. He came here without papers.

As a teenager in Chalatenango, he tried to cross the southern border three times before he succeeded in 1990 — smuggled with his brother in the trunk of a car at the Tijuana–San Diego crossing.

Once in California, he worked construction, janitorial jobs, and as a parish receptionist while learning English at night and earning a high school equivalency. By 2004, he had finished seminary at the Pontifical North American College in Rome and been ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington.

Pope Francis named him a bishop in 2023.

Christopher Hale, Pope Leo XIV Sends Former Undocumented Migrant

to Trump’s West Virginia,” Letters from Leo, May 1, 2026

Pope Leo is sending another not-so-veiled message to Americans who do not realize that Jesus was a migrant too. And his selections are showing how important diversity is going to be in the American hierarchy, replacing the right-wing ideologues appointed by John Paul II and Benedict.

Menjivar’s appointment came alongside three others. Pope Leo named Father John Gomez, a Colombian-born priest, as the new bishop of Laredo, the border diocese in south Texas.

To the Archdiocese of Washington, he sent two new auxiliaries: Father Gary Studniewski, a Toledo-born former U.S. Army captain who served eighteen years as a military chaplain and now pastors the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in northwest Washington, and Father Robert Boxie III, a 45-year-old Black priest who serves as Catholic chaplain at Howard University and becomes the youngest sitting bishop in the United States.

Father Studniewski and Father Boxie are kind-hearted, generous priests — the kind of pastors any local Church would be fortunate to have.

Boxie, a Vanderbilt-educated chemical engineer who graduated from Harvard Law before he entered seminary, has challenged the White House’s race-baiting campaign against diversity. He has been outspoken about it …

In 2019, Boxie offered a homily at the March for Life Mass that captured the breadth of his pro-life conviction. “How can you love the life you do not see in the womb if you do not love those lives you do see — the sick, the stranger, and the poor?”

Letters from Leo

Pope Leo’s message to the administration

The change in direction of the Catholic Church in the past 13 years has been monumental: First from Pope Francis, and now from Pope Leo.

The right-wingers who have presided over the destruction of the Catholic Church from the child abuse scandals are being replaced by New Testament Catholics.

The pope is taking the lives that most directly indict the cruelty of Trumpism and entrusting them with the institutional authority of the Catholic Church in the United States. He has sent a Salvadoran migrant to Appalachia, a Colombian immigrant to the Texas border, a Vietnamese refugee to San Diego, and a Black Howard chaplain to the capital.

The American hierarchy is being repopulated, in real time, by the kind of people the administration would prefer not to exist.

For West Virginia, the message is profound. The state’s lone Catholic bishop will now be a man whose biography includes an undocumented entry, manual labor, and English as a second language.

He will preach in coal country in his own accent, baptize the babies of West Virginia families, and bury Catholics in a state whose mountains will now hear the homilies of a man who learned English at night while sweeping floors in California.

Letters from Leo

Amen, brothers and sisters.