Evelio Menjivar-Ayala

When Bishop Evelio Menjívar goes home to El Salvador, his mother puts him to work. The ring comes off, the shovel and the machete come out, and he spends the visit weeding the family plot and helping build a shed for the chickens. He tells that story on himself, and it fits him better than any title does.

Warm, plainspoken, and quick to laugh at his own expense, he has carried that same manner through the priesthood and into the episcopacy, and it is why people who have known him along the way describe him not just by his office but as earnest and deeply spiritual, a shepherd with a big heart. He is the fifth of seven children, born to farmers in the Salvadoran countryside, and he has never really left that world behind. He credits his mother for teaching him to love the countryside and to understand everything created as sacred because it comes from the hands of God. Of the home he grew up in, he has said that although they did not have everything, they had the essentials for true happiness, faith in God and family.

For years after he arrived in 1990, he took whatever work he could find, receptionist, painter, janitor, construction, with English classes at night and a high school equivalency still to earn. He talks about those years with affection rather than as something he escaped. He liked painting best, he says, because he could see the results of his own work, and he liked the way a job site turns into a kind of family. Standing before a graduating class long afterward, he put it lightly: not bad for someone who began cleaning restrooms and painting houses with no English. He has stayed close to working people ever since. He has celebrated Mass for construction workers killed on the job, wearing a hard hat along with his vestments, and he has said plainly what was in his mind as he blessed their names: it could have been me.

The call to priesthood reached him more than once before it took, first as a boy at home, then again as a young immigrant looking for somewhere to belong. He was ordained for the Archdiocese of Washington in 2004 and spent his priesthood in its parishes, working in English, Spanish, and Italian. Made an auxiliary bishop there, the first Salvadoran-born bishop in the country, he turned the milestone away from himself and called it a recognition of how much the Hispanic communities around him had grown. For his coat of arms he chose four words from Luke, ibat cum illis, he walked with them, and he means them plainly. Listen to people, he says, and do not judge them. On the day he was installed to lead the Catholic Church across West Virginia, he told a packed cathedral that the state truly felt like almost heaven, and then, more simply: "I come before you as your brother and shepherd, not with all the answers, but with a sincere desire to love you and to serve you the best I can."