West Virginia Congressman Mocked Salvadoran Prisoners. Then Pope Leo XIV Sent Him a Salvadoran Bishop.
Last spring, Riley Moore flashed two thumbs up inside El Salvador’s CECOT prison. On Friday, the pope handed him Bishop Evelio Menjivar — a former undocumented Salvadoran refugee.
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Let me say this clearly at the outset. I am not suggesting that Pope Leo XIV chose Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala to lead the Catholics of West Virginia in order to challenge or embarrass Congressman Riley Moore.
The pope chose this man because the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston needed a shepherd, and because Menjivar — a Salvadoran refugee turned American priest and bishop — has the heart and formation the diocese requires. There is no transcript, no memo, no smoking gun.
But I am Catholic, I believe in providence, and I believe what unfolded in West Virginia on Friday is the kind of holy coincidence the faithful are obliged to notice.
Yesterday I wrote about the retweet that foretold Robert Prevost’s papacy — his last public act on social media before the conclave, a quiet endorsement of Bishop Menjivar’s Easter rebuke of Trump’s work with Salvadoran President Bukele to send U.S. deportees to a maximum security prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador.
Three weeks later, Prevost was Pope Leo XIV.
On Friday, he made the man he had endorsed — a former undocumented Salvadoran migrant who as a teenager crossed the southern border in the trunk of a car — the lone Catholic bishop of West Virginia.
And on Friday, Riley Moore had to welcome him.
Moore is the second-district Republican congressman from northern West Virginia, the grandson of a former governor, and what Bishop Robert Barron — celebrating Mass for him in the U.S. Capitol last spring — called “a very ardent Catholic.”
His Friday statement offered “congratulations and welcome” to Menjivar, praised West Virginia’s “hardest working and most God-fearing people,” and pledged to work with the new bishop on “protecting the unborn, defending the rights of workers, and, most importantly, proclaiming the Gospel.”
What Moore did not say is what makes the moment matter. Here’s the background.
