WASHINGTON—Protesting Catholic Church sex abuse—every day—has gotten more challenging for John Wojnowski since a recent heart attack.
The 67-year-old frequently pauses to heave deeply while telling his story – how he went from being molested in an Italian village to spending 12 years fighting back outside the Vatican Embassy in Washington. He shuffles slowly to hand out flyers. He stops to wipe his dry mouth on his shirtsleeve, but doesn’t take a drink. There are no restrooms nearby.
He endures the discomfort because he’s confident his presence disturbs the Roman Catholic officials inside.
While vacationing in an Italian village during the summer of 1958, Wojnowski was excited when a Catholic priest offered him free Latin tutoring. But when the 15-year-old sat at his instructor’s desk, Wojnowski says, the priest grabbed his thigh and molested him. Wojnowski says he suppressed the memory for nearly 40 years, until he heard of a victim in Texas who experienced similar abuse and had committed suicide. Wojnowski started to remember.
Since then, he has been waging a solitary mission, determined to make the Vatican pay and make the crimes—which he thinks continue to be seriously under-reported despite recent abuse revelations—stop He crafted and unraveled his first protest sign 12 years ago. Today, the nearly four-foot-long banner reads, in blocky red-and-black letters: “Sociopaths Hide Pedophiles. The Vatican Hides Pedophiles.”
“You cannot imagine how totally crushed…totally powerless [I felt],” Wojnowski said of getting molested. “To the church, officially, it was a sin. But it was accepted—no big deal, absolutely every day business.”
Though Wojnowski revels in having found his voice on the corner of Massachusetts and 35 Street in this city’s northwest quadrant, he still mourns the morose turn his life took after he was abused. Wojnowski, once extroverted and social, said he immediately became self-conscious and withdrawn after the incident.
“Back in high school friends asked me, ‘Why are you so sad?’” Wojnowski recounted. “They remembered me smiling and now they see Woody Allen. I told them my best friend died.”
Wojnowski mourns the pain of having been molested, but basks in the daily battles he wages against the Vatican. Photo credit: Eleanor Goldberg
He started to fail at his classes and with girls—he stopped dating completely. He moved to Canada at 18 and never mustered the will to meet the man his father tried to connect him with, the kind of person who could have given a leg up on life. Wojnowski joined the military with his brother, but said he felt too insecure to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and go to college. His brother did though. Wojnowski eventually moved to Washington and pursued a construction job he found unfulfilling. He married the first woman he talked to as an adult. They had a son and daughter, but ultimately divorced.
“The church,” Wojnowski bemoaned. “They don’t understand the damage.”
But the Archdiocese of Washington contends it’s more empathetic to Wojnowski’s needs than he admits. Susan Gibbs, communications director, said it investigated Wojnowski’s case when he first reported it in 1997, despite the fact that the incident occurred in Italy. Though the Archdiocese found out that the priest Wojnowski named was deceased, the staff repeatedly offered to fund his counseling.
“When people see his signs, they think he’s stuck on the corner,” Gibbs said of Wojnowski. “What they don’t realize is that people have stopped and have offered assistance, but he has declined.”
Wojnowski said he tried therapy at first but it didn’t help him the way his vigil does.
Wojnowski said one Catholic cleric who worked at the embassy brushed by him daily, muttering “idiot” under his breath. He also said that another priest told him that passersby would “laugh” at his signs and flyers after Pope Benedict XVI apologized to American abuse victims in 2008, as though the pope’s contrition wrapped up the scandal, leaving no need for further outcry.
To help prevent further abuse, the U.S. Dioceses invested more than $21 million in 2009 for child protection efforts such as training programs, background checks and salaries for church staff who work with children, according to the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
“Things you see in the paper are mostly older cases,” Gibbs said of reported sex abuse scandals. “It’s still wrong. We’re offering assistance. We know it’s possible to get the healing.”
Wojnowski, however, takes specific issue with the Vatican, currently embroiled in another sex scandal.“Absolutely nothing’s changed,” Wojnowski said of the latest bout of cases to emerge charging Catholic bishops with covering up clergy sexual abuse. “They talk about justice and `never again.’ They are only more cautious.”