John Wojnowski

As of August 2018, 20 years later, Wojnowski appears daily outside the Vatican embassy, standing silently alongside a banner reading "The Vatican hides pedophiles".

In 1997, Wojnowski's memory of molestation was revived by newspaper accounts of Rudy Kos, an abusive priest from Texas, sentenced to life in prison and whose victims were awarded $119 million in damages. The case, and the huge damage award, got him thinking. He spoke to a priest in Maryland who helped him get church-paid therapy and advised him to seek financial compensation through the Archdiocese of Washington. According to Wojnowski, after some correspondence and long delays, the archdiocese informed him that the Italian priest was dead and that there would be no compensation. In April 1998 he took early retirement and began his daily protest outside the Vatican embassy.

He failed to finish school, and at age 18 left Italy for Canada, where he worked at odd jobs. He came to the United States in 1963, served in the army and worked as a laborer. He found a wife on a 1968 trip to Poland and had two children with her. Wojnowski says his wife left him after 30 years when ironworker jobs became scarce in the 1990s. He lists his past inability to keep a job as just one of many consequences of his alleged molestation. He says "It was so traumatizing. I repressed the memory of that moment, but I ruined my life. My temper changed, my appearance changed. I was avoiding people. I felt so insecure, I never talked to anyone."

John Wojnowski (born 1943 in Warsaw, Poland) is an anti-pedophile activist who has maintained a one-man protest outside the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington DC since 1998. Wojnowski, a retired ironworker, stands on Massachusetts Avenue during afternoon rush hour holding signs with slogans such as "My Life Was Ruined by a Catholic Pedophile Priest" and "Pedophilia: Catholic Clergy's Sordid 'Professional Secret'".