Bishop Evelio Menjivar speaks with “EWTN News in Depth” on Friday, March 14, 2025. / Credit: “EWTN News in Depth”
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 15, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
Evelio Menjivar came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant in 1990. Today he serves as an auxiliary bishop of Washington, D.C., and is the first Salvadoran U.S. bishop in an archdiocese that is home to over 200,000 of his former countrymen.
In an interview with “EWTN News in Depth,” Menjivar shared his conviction that immigrants “make the United States a great nation” and “make society better.”
After years of “blue-collar jobs,” upon his arrival to the U.S., Menjivar felt a calling to the priesthood and was ordained in 2004. He served as a parish priest in Washington for almost two decades until Pope Francis appointed him auxiliary bishop in 2022.
“I came here when I was 20 with a great desire to work hard, to go to school, to contribute to the well-being of this great nation that became my home country,” Menjivar told Montse Alvarado, EWTN News president and COO.
Menjivar said he attempted to enter the country three times before making it to Los Angeles. He explained: “I don’t feel proud that I crossed the border without documents.”
“But it is a testimony that many people cross the border with good intentions,” he said.
“Most immigrants come here because they do not find any other option in their countries and they put their own lives at risk. But once we enter here, we contribute with our own talents, with our own energy,” he told Alvarado.
He described the violence and chaos that led him to flee El Salvador for the United States.
“I was growing up during the civil war that started in … 1977,” Menjivar said. “We were forced to abandon our village in 1982. We relocated to another town in the same area, but the whole area was abandoned, left with nobody.”
“So the war was there,” he said. “That was the situation that I grew up in, and then in 1990 is when I left El Salvador, and the war continued for two more years.”
“Religious sisters, even American sisters, were killed. Many priests were killed. Catechists were killed. It was a situation of war that pushed me and pushed so many immigrants to leave their countries,” the bishop explained.
Menjivar said immigration is a “journey marked by a lot of uncertainty, fear, but also with hope.”
During Menjivar’s episcopal ordination Cardinal Wilton Gregory, then-archbishop of Washington, commended Menjivar’s dedication to those who work unfair wages to make a day’s living.
“Cardinal Gregory said very beautifully in the homily that I should never forget my roots,” Menjivar said. “And that way people, immigrants, anybody, will be able to be more open to share their own stories, knowing that I’m going to understand them.”
“As most immigrants do, I did janitorial work, I did construction, painting, youth ministry, you name it, all kinds of blue-collar jobs. And so that helped me to understand labor, hard labor, to learn to work hard.”
He said he is “very proud” of the work he did when he arrived in the U.S. and believes it is a “gift to be able to understand the hardships that people go through.”
EWTN’s Alvarado and Menjivar discussed a letter he and his brother bishops received from Pope Francis asking them to always remember human dignity when addressing immigration in the political climate today.
“The pope emphasizes the importance, the need, to defend the dignity of human beings, of immigrants,” Menjivar said. “His message is a message of concern … for the well-being of everybody.”
When asked about the lack of Hispanic bishops in the U.S. Church in light of how many Hispanic Catholics there are in the country, Menjivar said he is seeing progress in that direction, adding that he believes it’s very important that “shepherds understand their flock.”
“Yes, there are not many Hispanic bishops, but the number [is] increasing. There are more and more, especially during the last years with Pope Francis.”
“One of the things that we need to do as a Church is to promote more vocations to the priesthood. We need more Hispanic priests, that’s for sure. We need more deacons, we need more religious sisters and brothers to serve the Church.”
Asked to comment on how he responds to people in his community who fear deportation during this uncertain time, Menjivar said that while many “are expressing fear and anxiety” they are turning to the Church and to their faith for consolation.
“Thanks be to God, we have people that are very hopeful,” he said. “And they know that this is the moment when they need the Church the most. That they need to come as a community to pray.”
“People don’t know what is going to happen to them. But one of the beautiful things that we are seeing here is that people, they continue going to church and celebrating their faith.”
Menjivar said he never lost faith on his journey to the U.S. and has been able to continue on that path that led him to become a bishop because he knows “there [are] always people praying for us. There is always a light that is lit.”
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Pittsburgh, Pa., May 1, 2018 / 04:43 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- As the Diocese of Pittsburgh moves to condense its 188 parishes into 57 multi-parish groups, Bishop David Zubik hopes the new communities will become inspiring witnesses to the Catholic faith.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 7, 2022 / 11:57 am (CNA).
Oct. 7 marks the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, when the Catholic Church celebrates its most beloved devotion to the Virgin Mary.Like every other year, the rosary continues … […]
An artist’s rendering of the affordable apartment complex soon to be built by Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance in Los Angeles. / Courtesy of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance
St. Louis, Mo., Aug 26, 2024 / 06:30 am (CNA).
Los Angeles is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, with an average home price almost touching a million dollars in 2024 — a landscape that crowds out not only the poor, but also young families with children. The high cost of housing is one of the primary reasons why tens of thousands of people live on the streets of LA, and most of those who are housed are “rent burdened,” which means they spend more than 30% of their income just keeping a roof over their heads.
In the face of such challenges, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently announced it will provide land for a new housing development dedicated to serving community college students and young people exiting the foster care system.
Amy Anderson, executive director of Our Lady Queen of Angels Housing alliance and a former chief of housing for the City of Los Angeles, told EWTN News that a group of Catholic lay leaders from the business and philanthropic community reached out to the archdiocese with a vision for creating an independent, nonprofit affordable housing development organization.
“Our vision is to really collaborate with the archdiocese and [use] the resources potentially available from the archdiocese to create homes that are affordable to a wide range of populations and incomes,” Anderson told “EWTN News Nightly” anchor Tracy Sabol.
She said they hope to break ground on the project, known as the Willowbrook development, “about a year from now.”
“The archdiocese is a fantastic partner. They are providing the land for our first development, which is already in process, and we’re working really closely with them to identify additional opportunities.”
The proposed building, which will be located steps from Los Angeles Community College, will feature 74 affordable housing units, as well as “on-site supportive services” for young people transitioning out of foster care — a population that often ends up experiencing homelessness.
The land, located at 4665 Willow Brook Ave just a few miles from the Hollywood Sign, currently hosts a Catholic Charities building, which will move its operations to another site to make way for the apartments.
“Through Catholic Charities and our ministries on Skid Row [an LA street where many unhoused people live] and elsewhere, we have been working for many years to provide shelter and services for our homeless brothers and sisters,” Archbishop Jose Gomez said in a statement to LAist.
“With this new initiative we see exciting possibilities to make more affordable housing available, especially for families and young people.”
Making land work for mission
The Catholic Church is often cited as the largest non-governmental owner of land in the entire world, with an estimated 177 million acres owned by Catholic entities.
Maddy Johnson, program manager for the Church Properties Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (FIRE), noted that the Church as a large landowner is not a new phenomenon, but there is a need today to adapt to modern challenges like regulations, zoning, and the importance of caring for the natural environment.
Many Catholic dioceses and religious orders have properties in their possession that aren’t fulfilling their original purpose, including disused natural land and parking lots, as well as shuttered convents and schools. Sometimes, Johnson said, a diocese or religious order doesn’t even realize the full extent of what they own.
“How can the Church make good strategic decisions, strategic and mission-aligned decisions, if it doesn’t know what properties it’s responsible for?” she said.
The Church of St. Agatha and St. James in Philadelphia, with The Chestnut in the foreground, a housing unit developed on property ground-leased from the church. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
Since real estate management is not the Church’s core competency, FIRE aims to “provide a space for peer learning” to educate and equip Church leaders to make better use of their properties in service of the Church’s mission.
To this end, they offer an undergraduate minor at Notre Dame that aims to teach students how to help the Church make strategic real estate decisions that align with the Church’s mission. The Institute also organizes a quarterly networking call with diocesan real estate directors, as well as an annual conference to allow Catholic leaders to convene, share best practices, and learn from each other.
Fr. Patrick Reidy, C.S.C., a professor at Notre Dame Law School and faculty co-director of the Church Properties Initiative, conducts a workshop for diocesan leaders on Notre Dame’s campus in summer 2023. Courtesy of David J. Murphy/Church Properties Initiative
In many cases, Catholic entities that have worked with FIRE have been able to repurpose properties in a way that not only provides income for the church, but also fills a need in the community.
Johnson said the Church is called to respond to the modern problems society faces — one of which is a lack of housing options, especially for the poor.
“Throughout its history, there have been so many different iterations of how the Church expresses its mission…through education, healthcare — those are the ones that we’ve gotten really used to,” Johnson said.
“In our day and age, could it be the need for affordable housing?…that’s a charitable human need in the area that’s not being met.”
Unlocking potential in California
Queen of Angels Housing’s first development, which has been in the works for several years, is being made possible now by a newly-passed state law in California that aims to make it easier for churches to repurpose their land into housing.
California’s SB 4, the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act, was signed into law in October 2023. It streamlines some of the trickiest parts of the process of turning church-owned land into housing — the parts most people don’t really think about. These can include permitting and zoning restrictions, which restrict the types of buildings that can be built in a given area and can be difficult and time-consuming to overcome. SB 4 even includes a provision allowing for denser housing on church-owned property than the zoning ordinances would normally allow.
Yes in God’s Backyard
The law coming to fruition in California is part of a larger movement informally dubbed “Yes in God’s Backyard,” or YIGBY — a riff on the term “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY), a phenomenon whereby neighbors take issue with and oppose new developments.
Several Catholic real estate professionals with ties to California expressed excitement about the possibilities that SB 4 has created in the Golden State.
Steve Cameron, a Catholic real estate developer in Orange County, told CNA that he is currently working with the Diocese of Orange, which abuts the LA archdiocese, to inventory properties that could be repurposed for residential use.
He said their focus is on building apartment buildings and townhomes, primarily for rental rather than for sale, in an attempt to address the severe housing shortage and high costs in Southern California.
Unlike some dioceses, the Orange diocese has an electronic GIS (geographic information system) database showing all the properties it owns. Prepared by a civil engineering firm, the database includes details such as parcel numbers, acreage, title information, and demographic reports, which facilitate the planning and development process.
“Strategically, what we’re doing is we’re inventorying all of the property that the diocese and the parishes own, and trying to understand where there might be underutilized property that would make sense to develop some residential use,” Cameron said.
Cameron said he can’t yet share details about the housing projects they’re working on, but said they are looking to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Queen of Angels housing project as a model for how to take advantage of the new incentives created by SB 4.
“I think it’s great, and it’s exciting that they’re taking the lead and that they are able to find an opportunistic way to repurpose an underutilized property to meet the housing shortage in California,” he said.
“[We] look at them as a role model for what we’re trying to accomplish here in the Diocese of Orange.”
Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago with One Chicago Square in the background, a residential tower constructed on the former cathedral parking lot, which was sold in 2019. Courtesy of Maddy Johnson/Church Properties Initiative
John Meyer, a former president of the California-based Napa Institute who now works in real estate with J2 Development, emphasized the importance of viewing the Church’s vast real estate holdings as an asset rather than a liability.
Meyer said he is currently working with two Catholic entities on the East Coast on ground lease projects, one of which will fund the construction of a new Catholic Student Center at a university. He told CNA he often advises Catholic entities to lease the land they own rather than selling it, allowing the church to maintain ownership of the property while generating income.
Naturally, he noted, any real estate project the Church undertakes ought to align with the Church’s mission of spreading the Gospel, and not merely be a means of making money.
“Any time we look at the Church’s real estate decisions, it’s got to be intertwined with mission and values,” he said.
“We’re not just developing for the sake of developing. What we want to do is we want to create value for the Church, and we also want to create value for the community. So working closely with the municipality to make sure that needs are met, and to be a good neighbor, is important.”
He said Church leaders should strongly consider taking advantage of incentives in various states such as California for projects like affordable housing, which align with the Church’s mission and provide both social and financial benefits.
“Priests and bishops aren’t ordained to do these things, and sometimes they have people in their diocese that have these abilities, and sometimes they don’t,” Meyer said.
“This [new law] in California has created an incentive that we can take advantage of, so we need to take advantage of that incentive…it’s allowing us to unlock potential value in land while at the same time serving a social good that’s part of the mission of the Church.”
Is EWTN feeling the pressure from liberal bishops? They feature former head of Catholic Relief Services in opposition to President Trump trying to stop illegal immigration and now a bishop who justifies illegal immigration. I will have to see where this goes before anymore donations to EWTN.
I think the bishop was attempting to explain why he came here the way he did. Not justifying it. He stated he wasn’t proud of it.
I believe in law and order and secure borders but the problem isn’t so much about otherwise decent people like this bishop who cross our borders. It’s about the organized crime that is paid to bring them here. That needs to be shut down. Both for our sake and the sake of Latin American communities being wracked with cartel violence and extortion.
Wow! I think that the first thing President Trump has to tell Cardinal McElroy, in one of Cardinal McElroy’s ‘Synodality’ ‘listening sessions’ with President Trump, is to go back and tell Pope Francis to make Cardinal Evelio Menjivar head Bishop of Washington D.C, and Bishop McElroy as auxiliary Bishop.
Hmmm, well, would the good bishop ever say the words, “do not enter the United States illegally” or “only come with the desire to enter via the legal process”? Of course not.
The despicable mob rush at the US southern border is a crime he encourages via his silence. Follow the money, always follow the money,
International Migration and Minorities Research has shown that from historical times human beings have made super human endeavors to cross oceans and seas in the hope to migrate to new land masses.
Communities blessed with access to water-bodies like those in Polynesia, Melanesia, British Isles, the Caribbean Islands, Scandinavia, China, Japan, Arabia, Israel, the Indian subcontinent, the Indonesian Archipelago, and several such non-water-fearing and water-challenge-loving populations have a long history of migrating, settling, toiling, and meticulously developing the lands they happened to visit.
For centuries daring Europeans from Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany – have left behind a fascinating history of discovering new lands and encountering new peoples and learning new habits from people living in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
Braving ferocious winds and crossing rivers and seas, crisscrossing deserts, climbing hills and valleys, wading through hostile jungles that were often infested by wild animals, several of the old-timers ultimately made it and became beacons of inspiration for posterity.
Much exemplary labor has been invested by hordes of such migrants in the North and South Islands of New Zealand, across Australia, the entire Indian subcontinent, in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, in Canada, and in the United States of America.
Learning from their heroic efforts, newer generations believe nothing is impossible. Several challenge-embracing women and men are on the look out to migrate, toil, serve, and make the country of their choice greater than before. History, they say repeats itself.
Is EWTN feeling the pressure from liberal bishops? They feature former head of Catholic Relief Services in opposition to President Trump trying to stop illegal immigration and now a bishop who justifies illegal immigration. I will have to see where this goes before anymore donations to EWTN.
I think the bishop was attempting to explain why he came here the way he did. Not justifying it. He stated he wasn’t proud of it.
I believe in law and order and secure borders but the problem isn’t so much about otherwise decent people like this bishop who cross our borders. It’s about the organized crime that is paid to bring them here. That needs to be shut down. Both for our sake and the sake of Latin American communities being wracked with cartel violence and extortion.
I’m afraid that with Mother Angelica’s passing, EWTN has gone WOKE. What a shame.
Wow! I think that the first thing President Trump has to tell Cardinal McElroy, in one of Cardinal McElroy’s ‘Synodality’ ‘listening sessions’ with President Trump, is to go back and tell Pope Francis to make Cardinal Evelio Menjivar head Bishop of Washington D.C, and Bishop McElroy as auxiliary Bishop.
Hmmm, well, would the good bishop ever say the words, “do not enter the United States illegally” or “only come with the desire to enter via the legal process”? Of course not.
The despicable mob rush at the US southern border is a crime he encourages via his silence. Follow the money, always follow the money,
Bishop: Let’s get one thing straight – NO ONE IS SAYING MIGRANTS ARE UNWELCOME IN THE USA – NO ONE.
What Americans think, however, is that those who wish to settle here do so LEGALLY i e. respecting our laws.
Plase, bishop, don’t try to play us.
International Migration and Minorities Research has shown that from historical times human beings have made super human endeavors to cross oceans and seas in the hope to migrate to new land masses.
Communities blessed with access to water-bodies like those in Polynesia, Melanesia, British Isles, the Caribbean Islands, Scandinavia, China, Japan, Arabia, Israel, the Indian subcontinent, the Indonesian Archipelago, and several such non-water-fearing and water-challenge-loving populations have a long history of migrating, settling, toiling, and meticulously developing the lands they happened to visit.
For centuries daring Europeans from Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany – have left behind a fascinating history of discovering new lands and encountering new peoples and learning new habits from people living in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
Braving ferocious winds and crossing rivers and seas, crisscrossing deserts, climbing hills and valleys, wading through hostile jungles that were often infested by wild animals, several of the old-timers ultimately made it and became beacons of inspiration for posterity.
Much exemplary labor has been invested by hordes of such migrants in the North and South Islands of New Zealand, across Australia, the entire Indian subcontinent, in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, in Canada, and in the United States of America.
Learning from their heroic efforts, newer generations believe nothing is impossible. Several challenge-embracing women and men are on the look out to migrate, toil, serve, and make the country of their choice greater than before. History, they say repeats itself.
For the life of me, why don’t people understand the obvious and HUGE difference between immigration and ILLEGAL immigration?
Captain Obvious, people!
The US is a nation of immigrants, from many countries and walks of life.
We should take care to not become a lawless nation of illegal immigrants.
Or are we already?