WASHINGTON (DC)
Alfred Friendly Press Partners
By Emran Hossain
He stutters and cannot speak English fluently. Yet, whenever the 70-year-old man comes across a priest of the Vatican’s United States Embassy, he introduces himself: “My name is John Wojnowsky. What is your name?”
Wojnowsky cannot say how many times he’s asked that question in the last 15 years, when he has spent a part of each of his days, weekends and holidays included, in front of the Holy See’s diplomatic mission, known as Apostolic Nunciature, in Washington, D.C.
Not a single priest, he says, will give Wojnowsky his name, just as the Vatican’s U.S. envoys never have replied to the letter he sent in August, 1997. His letter seeks a church investigation of his claim that a Catholic priest overseas molested him when he was age 15.
Though the issue of Catholic clerics’ sexual abuse of children has dominated headlines across the Western world, resulted in giant settlements and won accolades for U.S. media organizations, Wojnowky waited more than six months for a reply to his letter. Then one morning he decided to picket the Washington embassy. That is how his one-man protest began.
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