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The man Pope Francis should meet in Washington
By Matt Bai
[with video] When Pope Francis arrives in Washington Tuesday night, he will set his suitcase down at the Apostolic Nunciature, informally known as the Vatican Embassy. It’s an unassuming mansion along a highly trafficked stretch of Massachusetts Avenue, directly across the street from the Naval Observatory and the vice president’s mansion. When Francis looks out onto the locked-down avenue, however, closed to all but the southbound buses and a trickle of cars, he probably won’t see a 72-year-old, white-haired Polish immigrant named John Wojnowski, who has become as much a part of that sidewalk as the blistered concrete. And that’s a travesty, because it means that Francis will not see his embassy in quite the same way that many Washingtonians have glimpsed it through the years. He will not understand the lonely sacrifice of one broken, belittled man, or the depth of despair that exists in some quarters of the American church. Wojnowski’s story has no clear beginning or end; rather, it replays itself every day, in the same endless loop, and probably will for as long as he’s alive. So let’s just start it here: One day in 1997, Wojnowski read an in item in the newspaper about a sexual abuse scandal roiling a Catholic diocese in Texas, where the victim had killed himself. An Army veteran and longtime ironworker, Wojnowski had just taken early retirement because of failing knees. Separated from his wife and emotionally estranged from his two children, he was living alone with his regrets in the working-class suburb of Bladensburg, Md., getting by on Social Security and a small pension. Something about this story jolted him. It unearthed, he says, the shards of an adolescent memory he had blocked from his mind for 40 years. When he was 15, Wojnowski will tell you, he was tutored by a middle-aged priest in Milan, where his father was a university librarian. The priest touched him and asked him to masturbate. Wojnowski, embarrassed and confused, asked if the priest was going to show his genitalia, too. The rest he has never remembered, or can’t. “I just remember standing outside the building,” he says. “The feeling was so terrible. So final. I ruined my life.” His first thought after reliving this memory, though he would be embarrassed to admit this later, was that maybe he could make some money off it. He needed money. Maybe the church would give him $20,000. So he entered a confessional and told a priest, and the priest sent him to a church therapist, and the therapist told him to write a letter to the Vatican’s embassy in Washington. The therapist told him exactly what the letter should say. An embassy official wrote Wojnowski back, asking for more details. Wojnowski, who has an eighth-grade education but a natural gift for language, provided more details in another letter, but no one at the embassy replied further. Nor did anyone answer his next several letters. “They were ignoring me,” Wojnowski says. “They were sure I would do nothing else.” Here’s what Wojnowski decided to do: He copied the question mark with which he had ended his most recent letter to the embassy and blew it up until you could see it from a block away. He put that question mark on a makeshift placard, along with a question addressed to Bishop William Lori: “Do you recognize this question mark?” Then he drove himself down to the embassy, stepped onto the public sidewalk and stood there. That’s it. Just stood there — a middle-aged man and his question mark. He did this for days — maybe weeks, he can’t remember now — until the bishop finally wrote him back, explaining that the priest who had abused him was long dead now, and there was nothing to be done. The church, he said, would pay for Wojnowski’s therapy. “To me, that was a joke,” Wojnowski says. He made a new sign. It said: “My life was ruined by a Catholic pedophile.” A young Italian priest came outside to talk with Wojnowski, or perhaps intimidate him. The way Wojnowski heard it, anyway, the priest told him his abuse was his own fault and that protesting in this way would only bring him shame and ridicule. He vowed to return every day. And he has. For more than 17 years now — more than 6,000 days, even allowing for a handful of absences — John Wojnowski has shown up on this sidewalk, weekdays and weekends, from late afternoon until darkness obscures him. Through three presidents and three popes, through swampy summers and polar fronts, through downpours and blizzards and cyclical storms of cicadas. I asked him, during a typical afternoon on his sidewalk last week, how long he intended to carry on with this mission, now that the pope had openly apologized for a scandal no one would even discuss when Wojnowski first took up his protest. Wojnowski didn’t quite answer. Instead he explained to me that his abuse as a teenager had left him emotionally paralyzed and bereft of self-confidence. He had broken one promise after another — to be a better husband, to spend more time with his kids. He paid for classes in electronics and psychology, hoping to broaden his career, but could never bring himself to follow through. “I never finished nothing,” Wojnowski said, disgusted with himself. “I intend to finish this.” ***** As it happens, Newsweek brought me to Washington in 1997, right about the time that Wojnowski was staking out his sidewalk. I lived about a mile away, in Glover Park, and on a lot of afternoons I would drive past and read his sign. Eventually I would honk and smile, because I admired his tenacity, and he would wave appreciatively. Like most Washingtonians, I had no idea who he was, nor did I realize that the unmarked building behind him belonged to the church. For years, I presumed he had chosen that spot because of the vice president’s house and the steady stream of rush-hour traffic. Several weekends ago, I found myself paused at the stoplight at Massachusetts and 34th Street, and there was Wojnowski, sitting at the adjacent bus stop. When I lowered the window to say hello, he handed me a flyer. Along with his indictment of the church, the paper said he generally arrived at 4. I wondered what he would have to say about the pope’s impending visit. So one afternoon, I parked my car on a nearby side street and strolled down to the embassy to wait. A few motorists eyed me suspiciously, as if I might be preparing to whip out my own sign and take over the sidewalk. Sure enough, a few minutes past 4, Wojnowski arrived — he hasn’t driven for years and instead rides the bus for an hour each way, give or take — and began his preparation at the bus stop where we’d chatted a few weeks back.  The routine itself is like a sacrament. Wojnowski sits on the sheltered bench — he is plagued now by cataracts and hearing loss, and his bony hands shake — and assembles his signpost, which is a broom handle duct-taped to the kind of thin plastic pole that might hold a household Swiffer. He then removes the sign from protective plastic bags, rolled up and fastened with a belt, and attaches it with rope at either end. He is small and wiry, with thin white hair and watery eyes. He wore a tattered canvas shirt, and his cellphone was tethered to him by a rope on his waist that snaked around his neck and into a torn chest pocket. “I’m a dull person,” he told me as he worked. “If I could write, I would not be doing this. But I can’t write, so I’m doing this the hard way.” We walked the half-block down to the embassy, over gouges in the sidewalk that Wojnowski made many years ago, when he used to display his sign on a metal contraption. Now he holds it up himself. It is not easy work, especially on a warm day in waning summer. The canvas sign is maybe 12 feet long, weighing a few pounds even without the poles, and he hoists it about chin high, flipping it around every few minutes for the passing motorists. On one side the sign says: VATICAN HIDES PEDOPHILES. The reverse side proclaims: CATHOLIC COWARDS. Each has a website. When Wojnowski first took up his post, he told me, a lot of drivers would jeer at him or shout insults. He said he had several run-ins over the years with hostile officials from the embassy, one of whom, he claims, spit in his face. Over the years, however, sexual abuse in the church burst into public view, along with a decades-long cover-up. And it must have occurred to many of those driving by daily — as it did to me — that the loony old man with the sign on Massachusetts Avenue had in fact been onto something true and profound. Long before reporters at the Boston Globe and elsewhere exposed the church’s secret crime, Wojnowski had alerted thousands, if not millions, of Washington commuters to something seriously amiss; if a man felt wronged and ruined enough to make this his life’s work, you had to imagine that he wasn’t the only one. That was no small feat of public education, no matter how crudely accomplished. These days, more passersby wave in admiration for Wojnowski than exhibit disdain. But there’s still plenty of the latter, too. As we talked at one point, a man walked by, wearing a polo shirt with the Air Force Academy logo. He stopped to study the sign. “Why do you call them cowards?” he demanded. “Why cowards?” “They are cowards!” Wojnowski replied good-naturedly. He almost enjoys this kind of thing. “Are you Catholic?” “I am — proudly!” the man said. “It’s nonsense. And the pope is going to be staying here. You should be respectful.” Wojnowski said many Catholics had been silently abused. “Do you know any man who doesn’t commit sin?” his interrogator asked. “And priests too? So what does that have to do with Catholicism?” Another man, driving past a short time later, lowered his window to tell Wojnowski not to show up in the neighborhood when the pope was there. He said this in a way that suggested it was not the first warning, and it sounded vaguely menacing. Wojnowski shrugged him off. “All my life, I avoided people,” he told me. “I learned to talk on this corner. Now I feel like a motor-mouth.” His phone rang several times. Twice it was his brother in Poland. Once it was his wife, who now lives on her own in Florida and calls every day to check on him. The question you might be asking yourself, by now, is what exactly Wojnowski wants. What are the demands that keep him on this sidewalk, year after year, even as the church admits to its own shame? I wondered the same thing. I pointed out to Wojnowski that the world now acknowledged the systematic abuse he had set out to expose. Pope Francis had been remarkably frank and contrite about the damage, going so far as to meet with victims in the Vatican. “To me, that’s only words,” he said. “It’s easy to use words.” But didn’t Wojnowski feel vindicated? Hadn’t he won? “No!” he shouted at me. He looked genuinely annoyed. “You must not be very smart. I wanted financial reparation!” Over the years, Wojnowski explained, his initial thought of getting 20 grand had mushroomed to the hundreds of thousands and then into the millions, although now he had settled on a figure of $240,000. He wouldn’t say why that number, exactly. He said he also wanted the church to take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post apologizing for its treatment of him. You see, the way Wojnowski talks about it, he has no more control over whether he shows up on this sidewalk tomorrow than you or I do over paying taxes or sending our kids to school. The church has stolen 17 years of an old man’s life, he says, one monotonous day after another, by refusing to make him whole. His only choice was to get justice, no matter how long it takes. It’s the church that keeps choosing to withhold it. “I would be an idiot if I stopped,” he told me. “There’s no reason for me to stop.” ***** You might be tempted to dismiss Wojnowski as just another hustler, albeit an unusually determined one. You might think this obsession he has with cash cheapens his Cassandra-like story, because in the end all he really wants is to be paid off, like everyone else. The way I see it, though, Wojnowski’s demand is like any other form of moral restitution. It’s not substantively different from African-Americans talking about reparations for slavery, or Japanese-Americans receiving payments 40 years after their internment, or the heirs of Holocaust victims fighting to reclaim their stolen art. The money matters not for what it can buy, but because it is a tangible price to be paid, an acknowledgment of evil inflicted. This is, perhaps, why Wojnowski has never been consistent about how much he wants. What’s the going rate on a lifetime of depression and regret? And the more I reflected on my encounter with Wojnowski, the more I came to believe that it wasn’t really about the money, anyway. He hadn’t gone out and hired a lawyer, like other victims of abuse. He wasn’t seriously seeking meetings to negotiate his withdrawal from the sidewalk. No, Wojnowski had to know that he was never going to see a dime for his pain. And yet he came, still, to the corner. That’s because the sidewalk is his path to redemption, the thing that gives meaning now to what he considers an otherwise wasted life. It is, as he says, the one thing he will finish. As long as he is getting on that bus and unrolling his sign and jousting with the occasional heckler, Wojnowski is holding the banner, literally, for the thousands of victims — who knows how many — he often talks about, people who live with that awful silence or who take their own lives because of it. And this is why I’d like to think that Pope Francis might instruct his subordinates to go out and find this old man Wojnowski (who will be holding his sign somewhere as close to the barricades as he can get). If Francis can meet with victims at the Vatican and wash the feet of peasants in Rome, then surely he can invite Wojnowski into the embassy for a polite coffee and take the time to listen to his story. Because as Francis himself has now acknowledged, Wojnowski was right about the spreading darkness in the Catholic Church, when just about everyone driving by that embassy, and everybody buzzing around inside it, was wrong. John Wojnowski may never find what he’s looking for in that mansion at Massachusetts Avenue and 34th Street. But the sidewalk will always be his.
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