THE woman who first told Monsignor Patrick Cotter in 1974 that Father Vince Ryan was a pedophile has not been to a church or confessed to a priest for years.
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She says she has no faith in the church.
"I believe in God but I wouldn't go to church, and I haven't been since 1999 when my mother died and I didn't have to take her any more," she said. "I don't need the church. I don't need a mediator. I just need God."
She had not confessed her sins to a priest for many years.
"I couldn't confess to a priest. He might be one of them," she said.
She has questions for Bishop Michael Malone about the church's decision to conduct a large funeral for the monsignor at Hamilton Catholic Cathedral last month.
And she does not agree that the Vince Ryan case and Monsignor Cotter's cover-up is a matter for the past, not while Ryan's victims and their families are suffering the consequences in silence.
"He's destroyed a lot of families," she said yesterday.
The woman, whose son was six when Ryan indecently assaulted him, did not appreciate the extent of Monsignor Cotter's continued cover-up of Ryan's activities until The Herald's articles on Saturday outlining the monsignor's decision, in 1975, to "say nothing".
"My husband looked at the paper on Saturday and said 'Those so-and-so Catholics' and threw it down," she said. "He couldn't read it."
But the woman said she read every word.
In a statement to police during the Cotter investigation in 1996, she said "the colour sort of drained from his face" when she told the monsignor in 1974 what Ryan had done to her son the previous day.
In a damning letter that led police to recommend that a charge of concealing a serious crime be laid against him, the monsignor admitted that deciding to "say nothing" about the woman's allegation in 1974 was "unfortunately . . . a mistake on my part", and that Ryan had gone on to commit "more serious" offences against boys the following year.
She was horrified when she read of the extent of Ryan's activities and Monsignor Cotter's knowledge of them for almost two decades.
"Maybe if it had been nipped in the bud when I spoke, if something had been done then, there wouldn't have been so many children and so many families affected," she said.
She understood why Monsignor Cotter's large funeral would have angered victims and their families.
"In my opinion he should just have been buried and a notice put in the paper to say he was gone," she said.
"He didn't deserve it."
