By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A senior correspondent of a major daily political newspaper in Washington DC has retracted and apologized for a story it ran last week that accused the apostolic nuncio of verbally abusing a victim of clerical abuse.
The Catholic News Agency (CNA) is reporting that Politics Daily ran a story on May 7, about a 67-year-old alleged sex-abuse victim named John Wojnowski who accused Archbishop Pietro Sambi, apostolic nuncio to the U.S., of verbally assaulting him at least 15 times in the last 20 months.
According to Wojnowski, Archbishop Sambi called him an “idiot,” a “loser” and a “fetid pervert” among other things during his walks on the street of the nunciature in Washington D.C. where Wojnowski routinely protests.
Wojnowski, who claims he was molested in 1958 yet repressed the memory until 1997, has been picketing the Vatican embassy for the last 12 years, often carrying signs that read, “Sociopaths Hide Pedophiles. Vatican Hides Pedophiles.”
Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Washington D.C., said they had offered Wojnowski counseling and other assistance numerous times, but that the man claimed he “didn’t have time for it.”
Apparently, Wojnowski provided Politics Daily reporter Annie Groer with what looked like a detailed account of the days and times that Archbishop Sambi has allegedly insulted him.
Groer claims that she made “numerous requests” for comment from Archbishop Sambi, but that he chose not to respond to the allegations. Because Sambi never denied the story, the paper decided it must be true and ran the story.
Carl M. Cannon, a senior Washington correspondent who initially approved the story for publication, now says he regrets that decision and has removed the article.
“No Catholic official or lawyer asked us to take the story down,” Cannon explained, and said it was a decision made by editor-in-chief Melissa Henneberger, who made the move after re-reading the story post-publication.
Cannon admitted that the “disquieting story” did not “rise to our own threshold of fairness.”
For instance, it assumed Wojnowski’s complaints were factual. It also made the Archbishop look guilty by leaving out crucial facts about him, such as his involvement in arranging the first-ever meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and victims of clergy abuse in 2008.
Out of fairness, the paper withdrew the article, but is not quite ready to vindicate Sambi. Did he verbally abuse Wojnowski?
“We don’t know the answer,” Cannon conceded. “We don’t know, in fact, that the story is wrong. But we’re not sure it’s right, and we wish now that we had not published it.”
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