Why Did the Pope Appoint an Illegal Alien as an American Bishop?
After more than a decade of chaos, confusion, and pseudo-progressive politics under the pontificate of the late Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV is restoring some sense of stability to the Vatican. The clarity of the pontiff’s words, however, would be greatly aided by a corresponding clarity in his actions. As our own Paul Kengor pointed out recently, Pope Leo has rejected the progressive, globalist call for open borders, instead reaffirming the Catholic Church’s longstanding support for national sovereignty and the authority — indeed, the obligation — for rulers and lawmakers to protect their people.
“Personally, I believe that a state has the right to regulate its borders,” Pope Leo recently said. “I am not saying that everyone must be allowed to enter without order, sometimes creating in destination countries situations more unjust than those they left behind.”
At a time when political division is manifesting as violence in the U.S., one would think that the pontiff would want to encourage American Catholics to love their nation in accord with virtue.
While the pope’s clarifications are helpful and — again, coming on the heels of the Francis pontificate and particularly at a time when the American president has pledged to carry out a mass deportation campaign — meaningful, the pontiff’s affirmation of the Church’s teachings on immigration, border security, and national sovereignty seem somewhat undermined when he appoints a deported illegal alien as the bishop of an American diocese.
Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, formerly an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has been named the bishop of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston in West Virginia. “This diocese, which encompasses the entire state of West Virginia, lies in the heart of the Appalachian region, a land of striking beauty, rich in diversity and natural resources,” the newly-elevated bishop said in a statement, thanking the pope for the appointment. “At the same time, it is a place where much of the people have endured a long history of hardship, marginalization, and inequality. Yet, as it often happens, its people have been sustained by a resilient and enduring faith.”
As a teenager, the El Salvador-born Menjivar-Ayala attempted three times to enter the U.S. illegally, according to a profile from the Catholic Standard, and was deported at least once. He succeeded in his efforts to remain in the U.S. in 1990 and somehow attained U.S. citizenship in 2006. In 2004, Menjivar-Ayala was ordained a priest of the Washington Archdiocese by the notorious serial homosexual predator, now-ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. He became an auxiliary bishop for the diocese under then-archbishop Cardinal Wilton Gregory and has served under the current archbishop, the infamously progressive Cardinal Robert McElroy, who was appointed to the role by Pope Francis shortly after President Donald Trump was reelected to the White House in 2024.
Menjivar-Ayala was nine years old when his family fled civil war in their native El Salvador. He is not an example of some unfortunate child who was dragged across the U.S. border by his parents, who really had no idea what he and his family were doing. He was about 19 years old by the time that he successfully violated America’s border and sovereignty and had already been deported at least once. This act alone is a grave and serious offense according to Catholic teaching, yet there is no record of the bishop ever apologizing or atoning for this crime. Instead, he has publicly attempted to justify his repeated efforts to break the just laws of the U.S., framing his entry into the U.S. as a desperate attempt to flee violence in his home country.
Of course, Menjivar-Ayala makes no mention of having had to travel through Guatemala and practically the whole length of Mexico (and possibly Honduras, too) in order to reach the U.S. Seemingly no attempt was made to settle in any of those three neighboring nations. Even after having been deported from the U.S., he did not decide to settle elsewhere, but instead continued to try to violate American law — until he successfully did so.
If an observer were to exercise charity and not ascribe to Pope Leo a political motive for the appointment, that observer would be hard-pressed to find another reason that an outspoken former illegal alien has been elevated to lead a diocese. Perhaps the bishop has evinced a particular pastoral ministry? By his own admission, Menjivar-Ayala has focused much of his ministry on D.C.’s Hispanic community. West Virginia, where he has now been assigned, has one of the smallest Hispanic populations in the entire nation.
Pope Leo has done much to correct the blunders of the Francis pontificate, restoring much-needed clarity in an increasingly confused and confusing world, but this latest appointment is a difficult one to understand in any context other than political. Not only has Menjivar-Ayala unapologetically violated American law, he has also been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, particularly mass deportations. Commenting on immigration enforcement raids in D.C. last year, Menjivar-Ayala said that “that could have been me.” With all due respect to his excellency, if America’s laws had been enforced properly over the past several decades and the plethora of loopholes available to lawbreakers had been closed, then it would have been him.
One final point: American Catholics have seen a slight uptick in hostility in recent months and years, coming from the Right. The globalist-coded rhetoric of the Francis pontificate and the incessant pro-open-borders blathering of American bishops has been labeled evidence of the Catholic Church as a “foreign influence” threatening to undermine the U.S. Of course, the bishops’ blathering is, at best, a dilution and, at worst, an abominable butchering and subverting of the Catholic Church’s perennial teachings on national sovereignty, borders, culture, immigration, and the obligations immigrants have to their new home countries. But this point is difficult to make when the head of the Catholic Church elevates a proud illegal alien and immigration activist to lead a diocese in one of the most rural, most politically conservative, and least ethnically diverse states in the country.
At a time when political division is manifesting as violence in the U.S., one would think that the pontiff would want to encourage American Catholics to love their nation in accord with virtue, which makes Menjivar-Ayala’s appointment all the more confusing.
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