OPINION: Monsignor sought end to pedophile articles  

One week earlier, on October 1, 1997, my first column (see below) calling on the Catholic diocese of Maitland to come clean on Fr Ryan had appeared, but not even for a moment as Monsignor Cotter introduced himself in an almost whisper-quiet, Irish voice did I entertain the possibility of disclosure.

We could talk on the phone, I offered immediately. No, he wanted to talk face to face. Did he want me to go to his home? No. And after he'd rejected meeting at The Herald or over coffee nearby, he said he wanted to see me in my home privately.

I resisted, he insisted, repeatedly, that we meet at my home, and at 3pm on the next Saturday, October 11, 1997, he arrived at the front door, a tall, lean man in, I know now, his early 80s. We went through the house and up the backyard to my shed, where we sat in old director's chairs under the awning next to the chook pen, and I explained that this was about as private as I could do.

Monsignor Cotter mentioned my mother and her parish church, one or two people associated with our family and that he'd heard I'd been a lively boy at St Pius X, my high school at Kotara, and it seemed to me that this was not so much small talk as reminding me who I was. And I should explain that I well enjoyed my time at St Pius (even if it didn't always enjoy me), that the priests who taught me were good men, and that while my family's maternal line is religiously Catholic I am only nominally Catholic, so nominally I'm not even lapsed.

And while I didn't know Monsignor Cotter, I was aware that he would be held in something approaching awe by the faithful, and I think that and his dignified bearing lent him a certain presence.

Anyway, after a bit of history I asked why he'd sought the meeting and he came straight to the point.

He wanted me to stop writing about the Vince Ryan matter.

Why?

Because it was damaging the diocese and the church.

At about this time my wife arrived with a tray of her home-made biscuits, a teapot and cups and saucers, a first in my shed for the beverage and drinking vessel.

Monsignor Cotter assured me, in answer to my question, that he had not been sent by Bishop Malone. Bishop Malone, by the way, became head of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese at about the time police charged Fr Ryan two years earlier.

There is no doubt my column 10 days before had shocked the upper echelons of a clergy that had lounged for decades in the veneration of the masses and the media. "Fr Ryan's crime is serious wicked and abhorrent almost beyond belief according to last week's sentencing judge but it may be a lesser crime than that of anybody in the Church who may have permitted his behaviour," I wrote.

I was left with the impression that it was Monsignor Cotter, perhaps as acting bishop, who 20 years earlier had sent Fr Ryan for counselling to Melbourne for a year when a parent complained about Ryan's sexual assault of her son in that year Fr Ryan was counselled once. As I'd written, Fr Ryan had then returned "to another parish, to a fresh batch of boys". And often over the next two decades he was transferred to another parish, to a fresh batch of boys. 

For almost all this period he was known by Monsignor Cotter, one of the Maitland diocese's most senior priests and administrators, to be a pedophile.

Monsignor Cotter was adamant that there had been no complaints about inappropriate behaviour involving Ryan and children in the 18 or 19 years since Ryan's return to the Maitland diocese until, of course, the complaints that went all the way to court.

(A year or two later the mother of one of the victims told me in detail how a decade earlier she'd phoned Monsignor Cotter to complain that Ryan had molested her son.)

We talked briefly about my conviction that my responsibilities as a journalist were to this paper's readers and the community, not the church, and about his line that no good would come of my campaign for an explanation from the Catholic diocese, and at one point the priest asked if I'd been a victim of pedophilia!

When I told him I would continue to challenge what appeared to have been a tolerance of Ryan's serial pedophilia, he stood to go.

I walked him to the gate and I was surprised to learn that he'd parked a block away and around a corner.

A few years later my former St Pius X rector, or principal, the very Irish Fr Patrick Helferty, who had taken to phoning me at work and who was memorably distressed when I referred once to bishops as geezers, told me that Bishop Leo Clarke, who had been head of the Maitland Catholic diocese for much of Vince Ryan's career as a pedophile, had been ordered by the Vatican to retire when it learnt of the police investigation into Ryan.

Fr Helferty, Bishop Clarke and Monsignor Cotter have died. Vince Ryan is due out of jail in May, 2010.  

Caption:  

PRESENCE: Monsignor Patrick Cotter.