The Protester

Anyone who regularly drives up and down the Embassy Row stretch of Massachusetts Avenue in the District has seen John Wojnowski and his provocative banners that scream things like “Vatican Hides Pedophiles!” He’s a gaunt older man with close-cropped hair and glasses who stands at the street corner across from the US Naval Observatory (official home of the vice president of the United States), scanning passing cars with an intent gaze and his mouth stuck between a smile and a grimace. He’s out there at rush hours, and often on weekends. He occasionally points at his banner, as if you might otherwise miss his huge, blaring indictment of the Catholic Church.

I’d been passing him in my car for years before I had any idea of his identity or backstory. Why did he seem to want to vice president, specifically, to know how he felt about priests diddling young boys with impunity and apparent immunity? That particular entrance to the Naval Observatory is the location of the Atomic Clock, which gives the super-exact time in huge digital numbers. Perhaps the lone protester also was making some statement about “time running out” on Rome’s misdeeds? Sometimes I’d beep my horn in support and give him a thumb’s up—as I, too, am appalled by the well-documented blind eye with which the Catholic Church long has regarded priests’ sexual abuse of boys and young men (and sometimes girls and young women, as well).

But then, a few years ago, the Washington Post ran a story on him, and discovering his name led me to the inevitable “John Wojnowski” Wikipedia page, which brought additional details. The condensed profile is this: He was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1943. He says he was sexually molested by a village priest in Italy when he was 15 and, although he tried to suppress the memory for much of his life, the incident left him angry, reclusive and insecure. It greatly affected his relationships and employment history in Europe, Canada and the United States, he says. (According to Wikipedia, he is divorced from his Polish wife and has two children.) He took early retirement from his job as an ironworker in April 1998 and began his one-man protest. It turns out that the nondescript building behind him is the “Apostolic Nunciature,” or US embassy of the Vatican. Apparently the vice president’s ringside seat is strictly coincidental.

In a follow-up story this May, published by the Post but written by the Religion News Service, a spokeswoman from the Archdiocese of Washington was quoted as saying it had investigated Wojnowski’s charges, discovered that the Italian priest who allegedly molested him had died, but repeatedly offered to pay for Wojnowski’s therapy. Wojnowski had declined, saying he’d tried therapy but finds protesting more therapeutic.

Watching him out there in all kinds of weather—broadcasting his fury, sometimes jeered by passing motorists, occasionally engaged in heated debate with pedestrians—it’s hard for me to see what’s therapeutic about his one-man stand. And recent banners make me wonder if he’s made the mental journey from consumed to unhinged. One I saw a few weeks ago read, “Ratzinger the Sodomizer.” Now, it’s one thing to condemn a church that by nearly all accounts could have done and should be doing more to stop sexual abuse by priests. But it’s quite another thing, it seems to me, to “out” as a buggerer the current pope, who to my knowledge has never been publicly or legally linked to anything of the kind. (I also wonder if that isn’t a libelous statement for which Wojnowski could be prosecuted. It seems to me that if he instead were accusing his across-the-street neighbor Joe Biden of violating the tender rumps of Senate pages, the Secret Service would have old John in custody before the Atomic Clock could tick off five minutes.)

All of that written, however, I can’t claim to know what did or didn’t really happen to John Wojnowski, what personal demons are calmed or fed by his protest, how he’d feel or what he’d become if he didn’t have this campaign to occupy and fuel him. I feel sorry for him, and I’ll continue to beep my support when his banners bear messages I find supportable. Because what I find sadder even than John Wojnowski’s life is the fact that sooner or later he’ll go the way of his alleged abuser, the banners will disappear, but the actions he’s been protesting all these years will likely continue, with little more than lip service being paid toward meaningful reform.