The recently appointed bishop of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, told The Guardian that he will keep “defending immigrants and fighting for fair treatment for them.”
“We are not approaching this from a partisan political standpoint, but from a moral one,” said Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala. “The Church bases its teaching, its social doctrine, on the Holy Scriptures and the Gospel. The defense of immigrants’ rights is … grounded in the Gospel and the Holy Scriptures.”
Born in El Salvador in 1970, Bishop Menjivar-Ayala was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington in 2004 and appointed an auxiliary bishop in 2022. He was the subject of a 2023 Washington Post essay, “He was an undocumented immigrant. He became ‘Your Excellency’.“