An abuse hotline set up by the Catholic Church in Germany melted down on its first day of operation as more than 4,000 alleged victims of paedophile and violent priests called in to seek counselling and advice.

The numbers were far more than the handful of therapists assigned to deal with them could cope with. In the end only 162 out of 4,459 callers were given advice before the system was shut down.

Andreas Zimmer, head of the project in the Bishopric of Trier, admitted that he wasn't prepared for "that kind of an onslaught." The hotline is the Church's attempt to win back trust in the face of an escalating abuse scandal that threates the papacy of German-born Pontiff Benedict XVI in Rome.

On the same day as the hotline was launched came allegations of serial abuse perperated against children by Bishop Walter Mixa - an ally and friend of the pope - when he was a priest overseeing a Catholic childrens' home in the 70's and 80's.

The leader of Germany's Roman Catholic bishops said in a Good Friday message he hoped Christianity's most solemn day would mark a "new start" for a church buffeted by scandal.

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch said Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Christ, must "mark a new departure which we so badly need."

It comes in the wake of a wave of damaging allegations about cases of paedophile priests.

Pope Benedict XVI allegedly knew about one particularly disturbing paedophile case in the United States. The Rev. Lawrence Murphy spent years molesting children at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but when the case came to the attention of the Vatican many years later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became pope, declined to take action.

The pope, however, made no mention of the scandal during his pre-Easter mass at the Vatican on Thursday.

An Austrian victim support group has received reports of 174 more cases of maltreatment and sexual abuse in Roman Catholic institutions since creating a hotline two weeks ago, the group said Friday.

The Platform for Victims of Violence by the Church set up the special number amid a spate of paedophile priest scandals in Europe and the United States which have engulfed the Vatican.

"We are learning daily about the methods of education in Catholic institutions in Austria during the 1960s and 1970s," Holger Eich, a psychologist from the group, told a press conference alongside a victim.

"They can be summed up in one word - sadism."