[...]

"Almost every afternoon for four years, John Wojnowski has stood in front of the Vatican's embassy on Massachusetts Avenue NW, directly across from the vice president's mansion, holding signs decrying sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

"Pedophilia: Catholic Clergy's Sordid 'Professional Secret,' " reads the latest version, which he shakes back and forth to catch a driver's fleeting attention, then flips over to deliver a second punch: "Gross and So True."

"It has been a painfully public protest by a painfully shy man. The cold, the rain and the sun, being cursed, threatened and repeatedly robbed of his signs -- the lonely battle has tired Wojnowski, but in a way it has also sustained him. Now, as a sex abuse scandal spreads from diocese to diocese and shakes the church around the world, he senses vindication coming.

"It feels good," he said in Polish-accented English.

"Far from being homeless or deranged, Wojnowski is a 58-year-old retired ironworker, living on an $1,100-a-month pension, who commutes by bus and Metro from his house in Bladensburg, in Prince George's County, to his regular spot on the sidewalk just beyond the legal boundary of the Vatican embassy, formally known as the Papal Nunciature.

"The reason for his mysterious and relentless vigil: When he was 14 or 15, he said, he was molested by a priest in Italy, and the experience plunged him into years of withdrawal and depression.

He was handing out this flyer (pdf version):