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What Took So Long? Washington Post 'reports' below. Failed to say why
they didn't interview the guy 4 yrs. ago. I can't believe they buried it on page C1. |
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No Longer a Lone Voice Crying
By Alan Cooperman People driving by used to call out "loser!" -- or worse. One man threatened him with a stick. Another tore the sign out of his hands, threw it into the back of a pickup and sped off. Many passersby assumed he was homeless or deranged. Now some stop to say he was right all along. Almost every afternoon for four years, John Wojnowski has stood in front of the Vatican's embassy on Massachusetts Avenue NW, directly across from the vice president's mansion, holding signs decrying sex abuse in the Catholic Church. "Pedophilia: Catholic Clergy's Sordid 'Professional Secret,' " reads the latest version, which he shakes back and forth to catch a driver's fleeting attention, then flips over to deliver a second punch: "Gross and So True." It has been a painfully public protest by a painfully shy man. The cold, the rain and the sun, being cursed, threatened and repeatedly robbed of his signs -- the lonely battle has tired Wojnowski, but in a way it has also sustained him. Now, as a sex abuse scandal spreads from diocese to diocese and shakes the church around the world, he senses vindication coming. "It feels good," he said in Polish-accented English. Far from being homeless or deranged, Wojnowski is a 58-year-old retired ironworker, living on an $1,100-a-month pension, who commutes by bus and Metro from his house in Bladensburg, in Prince George's County, to his regular spot on the sidewalk just beyond the legal boundary of the Vatican embassy, formally known as the Papal Nunciature. The reason for his mysterious and relentless vigil: When he was 14 or 15, he said, he was molested by a priest in Italy, and the experience plunged him into years of withdrawal and depression. Speaking to a reporter recently on the street corner he inhabits virtually every afternoon from about 3 to 6 p.m., Wojnowski often stammered and stopped in mid-sentence, searching for the right word. "I'm not very articulate," he said. "I never learned to speak well because I was avoiding people all my life." He prefers to let his signs speak for him. Some have been elaborate, incorporating cutouts of gingerbread children and a rotund bishop with a swiveling head. Each took hours to make and ate into his slender income. The Polish-born Wojnowski grew up in Italy, where his father was a librarian at a Catholic university. The family was religious, and he and his two younger brothers attended Catholic schools. One summer, in 1957 or possibly 1958, the three boys went camping alone for a month in the mountains. The priest in a nearby village offered to tutor John in Latin during their stay. So he went to the rectory. "I sat at the desk," Wojnowski said. "He sat next to me. He didn't even open a book. He put his hand on my knee, and then he pushed his hand up my shorts." For years afterward, he said, he forced himself to forget the rest of what happened that day. Once he told his mother that a priest had laid a hand on his knee. But he also told her that he had grabbed the priest's wrist and shoved it away. "I think I believed that," he said. "I wanted to believe that." On the corner, from the pocket of his blue windbreaker, Wojnowski pulled a curling stack of black-and-white photographs, ever ready to tell his story to those who ask. Here he was at 8, with dark wavy hair and a big smile. Here he was at 12, smiling again. "You can tell I was always happy," he said. "I was getting in trouble in school because I was giggling all the time." Then he flipped to a picture taken a few months after the camping trip. The eyes are sunken, the face frozen. No smile. "People who knew me asked, 'Why are you sad?' I didn't know. I felt as though my best friend died. . . . I remember telling my father I was afraid all the rocks around me could crumble," he recalled. Wojnowski said he began failing at school, dropped out and immigrated to Canada in 1961, when he was 18, and then to the Washington area in 1963. He worked as a dishwasher and a laborer, spent three years in the Army and changed his first name from Jan to John. But he remained so awkward and insecure, he said, that when he wanted to marry, he decided to return to Poland to look for a wife. He married the first woman he met and brought her back to Washington. They raised two children, both grown now, and separated several years ago, after three decades together. Barbara Wojnowski, reached by telephone at her home in Florida, said her husband always seemed sad, withdrawn and "just different" from other people, but until the late 1990s she was unaware he had been molested. "He blames everything on that one thing," she said. "I'm sure there were happy times, when the kids were little. [But] he couldn't express his happiness. . . . He was in his books mostly, reading." Wojnowski is slender and wiry, with close-cropped white hair and round wire-rim glasses. In his chinos and green Lands' End backpack, he could be mistaken for a retiree who has gone back to college -- if only he weren't carrying his sign and the megaphone he uses to cry "Shame!" at the embassy. His appearance also gives no clue to his former job. As a member of Ironworkers Local 5 in Maryland, he said, he worked for 30 years on construction projects in the Washington area, maneuvering on girders high above the ground andoften contemplating death. Though he struggled almost daily with suicidal tendencies, he said, he didn't know why -- or how to get help. Then, in 1997, Wojnowski said, he read about Rudy Kos, a Texas priest who was sentenced to life in prison for aggravated sexual assault on children. Kos's victims sued the Diocese of Dallas for negligence and won a record $119 million award, which was later reduced. The church eventually paid more than $30 million to settle the claims. The case, and the huge damage award, got Wojnowski thinking. He went to a church in Maryland and asked to speak to a priest. The priest invited him to sit down, but he couldn't. After 15 minutes of hesitation, still standing, he revealed the secret he had kept from himself and others for nearly 40 years. The Maryland priest, whom he declined to identify by name, helped him get therapy at the church's expense and advised him to write a letter to the Archdiocese of Washington seeking financial compensation. But after some initial correspondence and long delays, according to Wojnowski, the archdiocese informed him in writing that the Italian priest who had molested him was dead and that compensation was out of the question. So he showed up on Massachusetts Avenue with a sign -- "My Life Was Ruined by a Catholic Pedophile Priest" -- and his vigil began. Only once in four years, he said, did a priest come out of the Papal Nunciature and engage him in serious conversation, trying to persuade him to go away. He would have done so then and he would do so now, he said, if the church would just give him an apology and pay him something -- "whatever they think is right for a life of sadness." The Papal Nunciature did not return phone calls seeking comment on Wojnowski's protest. Although his account of his childhood could not be independently verified, public records confirmed his birth date, residence, marriage and union record, and he showed a reporter copies of some of his correspondence with the Washington archdiocese. Asked about the church's current travails, Wojnowski betrayed a touch of optimism and even eloquence, qualities he does not acknowledge in himself. "Do you play chess? Do you know about the Immortal Game?" he asked, referring to a famous match played in London in 1851. "White loses almost everything, has only three pieces left. But white ends up in a powerful position. White gives checkmate to black." |
