Bishop

After arriving in the U.S. while hiding in the trunk of a car, he asked and answered his own question: ‘What does God want from me?’ His answer: ‘I am here to walk with people, listen to them, be there for them.’

Read on to learn how a humble, undocumented immigrant, rose to a position of religious leadership.  

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Evelio Menjivar-Ayala (EMA) was the fifth of seven children born in the Salvadoran hamlet of Carasque near the Honduran border. 

CHILDHOOD

When EMA was 9, civil war broke out in El Salvador. The war would last for a dozen years. His city, Carasque, was the scene of some of the worst fighting – many dead or injured for life.  One resident recalled the horror of those days: “When the army came to occupy us, the men of Carasque hid farther up the mountains so they wouldn’t be drafted (into the army) against their will. The (rebels) took our pigs and chickens and never paid us. If they asked for your ID and you didn’t have it, they would beat you. When the rebels saw a woman walking alone, they would rape her and told her if she talked, they’d rip out her tongue.”

Catholic clergy stood up to the brutality – and some became victims. Just two months before EMA and his family fled Carasque, an army battalion slaughtered six Jesuit priests, along with a housekeeper and her daughter because they had all spoken out against the Salvador government. 

EMA was 12 when his family left their hometown, moving to a larger municipality, El Paraiso, where they were often treated as unwanted outsiders. “It was hard to be refugees in your own country,” said EMA. “We faced discrimination, the stereotypes of an immigrant.”

With a major army garrison nearby, the bloody civil 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 so EMA’s father urged him and his brother to go north rather than face what likely would be an early death. This is how EMA ended up in the trunk of a car headed for Los Angeles with a single change of clothes in his backpack. 

Three times in twelve months, the undocumented teen fleeing war-torn Central America tried and failed to make it over the southern border of the United States. On his first attempt, he was deported from Mexico. On the second, his guide turned back in Guatemala. On his third, he once again was apprehended in Mexico and landed in jail. 

EMA’s next option, maybe his last and only one, was to risk a more desperate gambit. After two days in detention, EMA, his brother and two cousins paid a mordida – a bribe – to get released. Then, by arrangement with a human trafficker, they stuffed themselves into the trunk of a car driven by an elderly American. When they felt the car stop and heard the driver crank up the music on the radio, it would be his signal for them to remain still and silent. 

That is how they got past the teeming port of entry at San Ysidro, California, between Tijuana and San Diego. The four young men spent hours in that trunk before reaching Los Angeles, where EMA’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. 

Two years later, EMA moved to Maryland in search of more opportunity since he heard that 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, Maryland.

Around the time the war was ending in El Salvador, EMA applied for asylum to remain in the U.S. with legal status. He received a work permit as his application began moving through an interminable bureaucratic backlog. While it was pending, EMA 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.

EDUCATION – PART ONE

Due to the civil war, EMA attended school in El Salvador only sporadically and was still in third grade at the age of 13 when he first enrolled in school in the U.S., where he was assigned a grade level according to his test scores for math and reading comprehension. 

EMA worked to learn English and eventually earned his high school equivalency diploma. 

FIRST ADULT JOBS ARE NEVER A CAREER COMMITMENT

Undocumented, knowing no English and with only a spotty education, EMA 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 strong belief that God had a path in mind for him, thought he had yet to discern what path it was to be. 

Perhaps the reader of his story thinks that there must have been times when EMA doubted Heaven’s hand. “No, I never put my faith in question,” insists EMA. “I mean, faith was what sustained me.”

OK TO SEEK ADVICE BEFORE PURSUING A CAREER

While in high school, EMA found welcoming church communities 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 EMA 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.”

CHALLENGE – IMMIGRATION STATUS

Enter Rev. Mark Brennan, who was then the Washington, D.C. archdiocese Director of Priestly Vocations. He, too, recognized EMA as a promising candidate. 

One of the things that had to be dealt with was the question of EMA’s immigration status. At the time, there was a ‘green card’ program for religious workers. And, as it happened, St. Mark’s needed a Spanish-speaker to run its youth program. Once the diocese advertised the job and determined there was, as regulations required, no qualified U.S. citizen available to take the job, “We were able to then hire Evelio,” said Brennan. (EMA became a U.S. citizen in 2006)

EDUCATION – PART TWO

Eventually the archdiocese sent EMA 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. 

SERVING OTHERS WHILE EARNING RESPECT AND PROMOTIONS

Upon EMA’s return to Washington, he moved quickly up the church’s leadership ladder, assigned several assistant pastor duties at different churches before appointment to Pastor of Our Lady Queen of the Americas, a small Hispanic parish near Dupont Circle in downtown D.C.

Meanwhile, more of EMA’s family have moved to the U.S. Three of his brothers and sisters live here now. His father died a few years ago but his mother refuses to come for more than a visit. EMA notes that “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.”

For nearly seven years, EMA was the Pastor of a vibrant melting-pot parish, whose membership is roughly 60 percent Latino and 35 percent immigrants from Africa. EMA has held several 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 the 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.

Eventually, that go-for-broke 19year-old who was smuggled over the U.S. border in 1990, earned a title he never insists to be called: “Your Excellency,” sharing an honor in the most rarefied ranks of the Catholic Church. 

After EMA was appointed an Auxiliary Bishop by Pope Francis in December 2022, EMA said a final Mass at his church, where the exuberant Cameroonian choir had ‘rocked’ the 11 a.m. service and presented EMA with an outfit made of traditional embroidered roghu fabric. The new Bishop 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.”

Editor’s note – The Archdiocese of Washington (D.C.), where EMA was appointed Auxiliary Bishop, is home to nearly 700,000 Catholics and encompasses the District of Columbia (known as ‘D.C.’) plus parts of Maryland.

There are other ways in which EMA’s 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,” EMA 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, EMA 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,” said EMA. “Empathy, my brothers, and sisters. Empathy – putting ourselves in the shoes of others – is to realize our common humanity.”

Editor’s note – ‘Bishops’ according to Catholic teaching, are direct successors to Christ’s own apostles. Bishops 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 Bergolglio 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 EMA and the archdiocese’s other new auxiliary bishop – Argentine-born Juan R. Esposito-Garcia, age 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 a church official, who noted that he himself was just shy of his 70^th birthday when he became Auxiliary Bishop of Baltimore.

CHALLENGE – PERSONAL SAFETY AS A PRIORITY

EMA remembers one rally with a labor union where his own zeal got the best of him. The weather was freezing, and a man who worked in a meat locker told EMA how many hours he had spent in temperatures like that without proper clothing and skin 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 could barely finish my talk.”

The next time EMA decided to show empathy for manual workers – laborers such as he had been when he began attending Mass at St. Camillus, his old parish – EMA wore a hard hat, identical to those that had been placed on 40 empty chairs, alongside a red rose, each commemorating a working man’s 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. 

CAREER SATISFACTION

Thought to be one of the first Central American-born bishops in the United States, EMA stands out among the church hierarchy. At age 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. Religious Census. Eventually, church leadership will likely reflect the diversity of its membership, rather than – as of 2022 – when 9 of 10 bishops are non-Hispanic Whites. 

At EMA’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 experiences that the new bishop brings to his 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.”

Every Catholic bishop, when 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. EMA’s motto is “Ibat cum illis” – a quote from Luke 24:15, it means “He walked with them.” It serves as both 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.

A professor of Catholic theology at Georgetown University observed that “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. (EMA) represents the church of the future and the best of our past.”

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This career story is based on several sources including a news article written by Karen Tumulty, published July 24, 2023 by The Washington Post plus internet research.