August 19, 2025

Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala speaks of his experience as a refugee from violence and how Catholics should act toward the strangers among us / By MICHAEL TANGEMAN.

Arriving to the United States as a teenage undocumented migrant – a refugee from his native El Salvador – Auxiliary Bishop Evelia Menjivar-Ayala of Washington, D.C. proceeded along the path taken by most immigrants: night school to learn English, hard work in multiple jobs, paying taxes, and eventually seeking and earning U.S. citizenship.

Menjivar-Ayala says he felt a calling to serve God and the church from an early age. As a child in a devout, impoverished family, he witnessed the U.S.-backed military regime’s violence against the dispossessed and how they targeted the Catholic Church for defending people. By the time the country’s 12-year armed conflict ended in 1992. the government and paramilitary forces had killed nearly two dozen Catholic priests. four nuns. and hundreds of catechists, including three American nuns and a lay missionary working with them. In 1980, just days after Archbishop Oscar Romero called for an end to government repression, an assassin gunned him down while he was saying Mass.

Menjivar-Ayala was ordained a priest in 2004 and appointed Auxiliary Bishop of Washington in December 2022 by Pope Francis. In this interview, he speaks of his experience as a refugee from violence and how Catholics should act toward the strangers among us. He also holds out hope that the church will be guided by Catholic social teachings and become an outward-looking, prophetic church that accompanies the poor and the vulnerable in our world today.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE in PDF or online at U.S. Catholic, here.