Vatican Official Allegedly Spits in Face of Protestor John Wojnowski

WASHINGTON (DC)
The Washingtonian

Escalating tensions between an embassy official and long-time protestor lead to a police inquiry.

By Ariel Sabar

Published December 19, 2012

Last week marked a milestone of sorts for John Wojnowski, the longtime protestor outside the Vatican’s US embassy, who was the subject of a lengthy profile in the July issue of The Washingtonian. For the first time in his life, he complained to law enforcement about the conduct of a priest. Not the village rector in northern Italy who he says molested him in the summer of 1958, when he was 15 years old—but a balding, bespectacled clergyman at the Vatican embassy, who, Wojnowski says, trampled his sign in August and then spit in his face last week after Wojnowski asked his name.

A spokesman for the US Secret Service confirmed that the agency was investigating the complaint but said no more, citing the ongoing inquiry. The Apostolic Nunciature, as the embassy is officially known, did not respond to several requests for comment.

Over Wojnowski’s 15 years of nearly daily picketing outside the nunciature, relations between the retired ironworker and the inhabitants of the boxy stone building on Embassy Row have tended toward a kind of strained disregard. While Wojnowski occasionally calls out “Eccellenza”—or “Your Excellency”—at the sight of the Vatican ambassador, the better part of his hours are spent standing beside traffic on Massachusetts Avenue with signs critical of the Catholic Church, particularly its handling of cases of clergy child abuse.

In recent years, however, Vatican officials have shown growing pique over his use of their lawn to assemble and disassemble his sign, an 8-by-3-foot banner that reads “Catholics Cowards” and hangs from jerry-rigged mop handles that come apart to fit in his rucksack. A video taken on Wojnowski’s camera phone and uploaded to YouTube in 2011 depicts the late ambassador, or apostolic nuncio, Pietro Sambi, warning Wojnowski to keep his belongings off embassy grass. “Otherwise it will disappear,” Sambi warns in the video.

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