The victims of one of this country's worst pedophile priests, Vince Ryan, might be silent in terms of media exposure, but when Monsignor Cotter was accorded the full honours of the Catholic Church at his death, Ryan's victims were on the phone.

They weren't the only ones.

Retired police officers who investigated Ryan and other Maitland-Newcastle diocese pedophile and alleged pedophile priests, still-serving police officers, legal representatives and groups that support sexual abuse victims, were angry and talking.

Monsignor Cotter might have been naive, out of his depth or just plain wrong about the extent of Ryan's offending, but there is no doubt he said and did nothing when he should have, and the lack of public knowledge about that fact made his funeral a lie to many people.

Which is why the Victorian-based Broken Rites website was given a call and handed some information about a 1975 letter that the church could not deny. And that set the ball rolling until last Saturday when the Herald was finally able to prove what many strongly suspected the church covered up for Ryan for nearly two decades, allowing him to molest more than 20 boys.

There has been outrage and anger from church faithful, claims that the Herald is simply dredging up the past, and the statement by Maitland-Newcastle Bishop Michael Malone that there was "suspicion of cover-ups hanging over [the late] Bishop Leo Clarke and myself".

In other words, the church could do without this kind of publicity.

But in two phone calls this week people wept. The first was a victim of a notorious, long-term Maitland-Newcastle diocese alleged pedophile priest who was seven when she was indecently assaulted in a church in 1984. The priest died in 2005.

"I'm so glad you called," she said when the Herald rang.

"It feels like I've been waiting for this for a long time."

The second was a man who tried to tell the Catholic Church about the alleged pedophile priest in their midst, who has lived in anguish for 20 years, knowing children were assaulted.

"I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted off my shoulders," he said when the Herald rang to say it was about to document the history of the priest for the first time, and the church's failure to deal with his offending for four decades.

The woman, now 28, clearly recalled the man's words.

"It's funny what you remember years later, but I remember [the man] telling us kids we weren't to go down to the church before school. We didn't know what he was doing at the time but he was trying to protect us," she said.

The man wept when he heard her words, because he tried so hard, but it wasn't enough to stop the priest.

"I'm so glad to hear she's OK. She was such a quiet, sensitive little girl. They were so young," he said.

"It's just given me 20 years of life to hear you say that."

Retired detective sergeant John Mooney was sweating and nervous when he walked to the door of the Catholic presbytery at Taree with then-constable Troy Grant in October 1995 to arrest Vince Ryan.

"This was one of the first of the big-time pedophilia priest cases in the Catholic Church in Australia," Mooney said.

"When you look at the dates of the other big cases even internationally the Irish and American cases they either hadn't come out or there was just starting to be publicity about them."

In 2002, 18 Irish religious orders agreed to pay more than $212 million to more than 100 victims of pedophile priests after the suicide of a priest charged with 66 serious sexual offences involving children.

In July this year the Catholic Church agreed to pay $760 million to victims in the Boston pedophile priest scandal, bringing the total paid to US pedophile victims to $2.1 billion.

In 1995, in regional NSW, two police officers were on "very new ground" when they pulled up outside the Taree church.

"As a police officer knowing that the church was giving him the smother [protecting Ryan], it wasn't easy," Mooney said.

"It was a little bit of a pioneering-type thing for the police on the ground who were involved with it.

"As a police officer, when you're taking on the crooks they know you're coming. Everyone knows their roles. But it was very, very different walking up to a priest to arrest him for molesting little kids.

"When you're dealing with people who were so-called highly respected members of the community you're up against a lot more than your average armed robber."

The wonder is that any of the prosecutions, compensation payouts and eventual revelations of Monsignor Cotter's cover-up came to light at all.

Troy Grant was on loan from Kurri Kurri police station where he was a general duties officer. He just happened to be on duty the night two of Ryan's victims walked in the door in 1995.

Mooney and retired North Region Crime Squad head John Ure both describe Grant as one of the most impressive police officers they've ever known.

Grant charged Ryan and led the investigation into three members of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese that resulted in a recommendation of a charge of concealing a serious crime against Monsignor Cotter. The matter did not go ahead in part because of the monsignor's age. He was 82 when police interviewed him.

The investigation uncovered Monsignor Cotter's damning 1975 letter in which he admitted he had "decided to say nothing" when given evidence of Ryan's offending.

The letter meant higher compensation payouts to some of Ryan's victims because the church had clearly failed in its duty of care to protect children from a pedophile.

The church has argued Ryan's offences and Monsignor Cotter's cover-up were in the past. But for people like NSW Police Inspector Grant, who is still in regular contact with Ryan's victims, and Newcastle solicitor Kate Maher, who has represented victims when they appear in court, what happened many years ago is still a major issue in 2007.

It is just as much a live issue for the child victim of the other notorious priest, and the man who tried to stop him.

"None of this will be settled until the church acknowledges its part," the victim said.

"If the church is going to survive, then it needs to come clean and it needs to say we did it, we hid them, we moved them around, we didn't report them to police because we didn't want people to know and we did that because we put the reputation of the church before the lives of the children, and we didn't want to compensate the victims. And it needs to say we were wrong.

"The more that it's hidden, the more that it's covered up, the worse that it is."

The Maitland-Newcastle diocese has more than its fair share of suspected pedophile priests who have been stripped of their faculties by the church even without criminal convictions.

There is Vince Ryan, the late Jim Fletcher, John Denham and the late priest whose offending left a trail over four decades of allegations, police investigations, a compensation pay-out, and movements across the country and overseas.

After reading in the Herald on Monday about Marie Cowles, a molestation victim of the late Father Jim Hughes, another woman has come forward to say she, too, was molested by him while at the Mater Hospital in 1981.

A Newcastle woman in her 70s, who worked within the Catholic system for many years, and who was a child in the 1940s when her father warned her to "keep well clear of him" about the notorious priest who died in 2005, sighed when asked this week how she felt when she read last Saturday's Herald articles about Monsignor Cotter's cover-up of the pedophile Father Vince Ryan.

"It's sad for the church, but I think it's a good thing because this information has got to come out," she said.

"The publicity's important because it might scare people off doing it again."

"If the church is going to survive, then it needs to come clean and it needs to say we did it, we hid them, we moved them around, we didn't report them to police . . . "