Relative to the rest of the country, the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston has a modest Hispanic population. “Barely about 3 percent,” Bishop Evelio Menjívar-Ayala said. But it’s growing.
The bishop has served the diocese, which covers the entirety of West Virginia, since his installation in July. He had served as the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Washington since his episcopal ordination in 2023.
“I’m doing listening sessions throughout the diocese these months to understand the reality of the diocese,” he said in an interview conducted in Spanish with America on the occasion of Hispanic Heritage Month. From Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, the United States takes time to recognize the profound influence Hispanic culture has had on the nation.
At the listening sessions, Bishop Menjívar-Ayala hears from Catholics—often older ones—who are happy to see joy-filled Latino families in their parishes. But they are also concerned.
“They see groups of Hispanics who came to work, maybe in building an energy plant, which is common here, and suddenly they stop showing up,” he said. “Maybe one person comes back to Mass—in English, of course—and asks, ‘Where are the others?’ They were arrested by ICE.”
Bishop Menjívar-Ayala said people in West Virginia are concerned, even those who aren’t Hispanic. His awareness of the fear his community faces is grounded in his own experience crossing into the United States decades ago.
An immigrant’s path
The bishop began his journey to this Appalachian diocese many years ago. In 1970, he was born in the rural, mountainous region of Chalatenango in El Salvador. As a child, he experienced the Salvadoran civil war and saw his 13-year-old cousin murdered in front of him.
Nevertheless, faith was central to his life. He served as a catechist and felt a call to the priesthood. He just couldn’t imagine how it could happen.
“You didn’t think about doing anything for the future,” he said. “The only option was to leave the country. And I never thought I could become a priest in the United States.”
As a teenager, Bishop Menjívar-Ayala fled to the United States, attempting to cross the border illegally three times before entering. After one unsuccessful attempt, he wound up in jail in Tijuana where, he said, he had his first experience of the church reaching out to immigrants.
“The people handing out food in the jail were Catholic,” he said. “In the food bag would come a burrito or tacos, and a rosary.”
Bishop Menjívar-Ayala was jailed again later, this time in Chiapas, where he, his brother and his cousins paid a bribe to be released. Then, as the bishop told The Catholic Standard in June, they made it across the border and into California hidden in the trunk of a car.
After some time in Los Angeles, he found it difficult to find a job after the post-Rodney King riots. He moved to Maryland, where distant family members lived. It was there that he attended a youth gathering in the Archdiocese of Washington and met Cardinal James Hickey. One of the young men asked the cardinal why the church didn’t support Hispanic vocations.
“I would be happy, happy to have Hispanic priests,” Bishop Menjívar-Ayala recalls the cardinal responding. “If anyone is interested in getting more information, write your name on a piece of paper, and [Auxiliary Bishop Álvaro] Corrada will call you.”
Seventeen young people wrote down their names, he said. Seven went to the information session with Bishop Corrada and then-Father Mark Brennan. Ultimately, only Bishop Menjívar-Ayala was ordained. And it was Bishop Brennan who handed him the crosier at his installation in Wheeling-Charleston.
Listening in Appalachia
Those he meets tell him that West Virginia needs workers and needs people to stay. “The towns are emptying out here; there are no young people, no children,” Bishop Menjívar-Ayala said.
Hispanic ministry needs to be developed in dioceses that have not historically been Hispanic, he said. He described Hispanic ministry in his own diocese as “in its infancy,” explaining that the church there is decades behind places like the Archdiocese of Washington.
“First we need a conversion in order to see reality, to see that, yes, there are Hispanics,” he said. “We need institutional conversion. Institutions need to convert so they can rise to what the times and reality demand. In other words, what our people need.”
In addition to a Hispanic ministry office, the bishop wants to find a way to accompany and provide legal assistance to immigrants, develop faith formation programs and guide young people in their spiritual journey.
“Communities are isolated and that keeps them from getting services, like water, for example,” Bishop Menjívar said of his diocese. He noted a shortage of food and water, especially in southern counties. Some live two hours away from a supermarket that sells fruits and vegetables, he said, so they rely on canned and processed food instead.
The Hispanic population is even more isolated, he said, because they are afraid to go out. They wind up living on the farms and near workplaces.
But he finds reasons to hope during the listening sessions. Bishop Menjívar-Ayala said the people of his diocese are delighted to attend the sessions, which are part of the synodal process initiated by Pope Francis.
A missionary church
Pope Leo XIV has newly appointed four Latino bishops to lead dioceses in the continental United States, including Bishop Menjívar-Ayala.
“Pope Leo has lived the same missionary experience that I’m living now in a foreign country,” the bishop said of Leo’s time in Peru. “Where do missionaries come from now? From Africa, from India, from Latin America in some dioceses. But the American church was very, very generous in sending out missionaries.”
Pope Leo was one of them, Bishop Menjívar-Ayala said. He described the prevalence of missionary priests in the United States as a kind of harmony, noting that in his diocese, half of the priests are from India or Africa, and only one is Hispanic.
“The very presence of a foreign priest or a foreign bishop reminds people that most Catholics and most of the people in the Appalachia region are immigrants,” he said. “They carry that memory, sometimes a bit dormant, the migration story of their ancestors, their parents, their grandparents. It’s a beautiful thing that people are rediscovering their own history as immigrants. That’s still alive here in the Appalachian mountains.”
Those who attend the listening sessions bring up a variety of topics, like the relatively small number of young people who attend church, he said. And connected to that, they recognize the need to evangelize.
“One of the questions I ask them is: If the parish stopped existing, would the broader community notice?” Bishop Menjívar-Ayala said. “And then they start talking about all the good they’re doing for the community at large—the food banks, the Lenten fish fries they do, which draw a lot of people. So they start realizing, ‘Oh, it’s not just about having Mass and having 30 people on Sunday. What matters is being a living presence of the church in the community.’”
Radical hospitality
Bishop Menjívar-Ayala’s episcopal motto is “Ibat cum illis”—“he walked with them,” taken from the Gospel of Luke and the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus.
“That is where Jesus himself walks with the disciples, who were tired, who were sad, who were without hope,” he said. The disciples speak with the Lord, who appears as a stranger, and they invite him to stay.
“We forget the miracle of hospitality. For me that’s very important—that miracle takes place, which is the Eucharist itself, but it begins with hospitality,” he said. “It’s the walking together, but also the hospitality.”
The listening sessions, he said, mirror this Gospel story.
“Those listening sessions must lead us to a radical hospitality, where we invite the stranger to stay with us, to be part of us, to sit at the table,” Bishop Menjívar-Ayala said. “That’s where the miracle of the Eucharist, and the miracle of recognizing Christ visiting us, takes place—in that radical hospitality of inviting the unknown person to stay with us.”
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