DUBLIN — Nearly 40 years since the last papal visit to Ireland, Pope Francis arrived Saturday to a transformed country where the once-mighty Roman Catholic Church is in tatters.
With recent revelations of institutional cover-ups of sexual abuse in the United States and Chile, many Catholics had hoped that Francis, who has struggled throughout his tenure to grasp the enormity of the scourge, would use the wreckage of the Irish church as a backdrop to announce muscular new measures to protect children in his church.
Instead, on the first day of his two-day visit here for the ninth World Meeting of Families event, he offered a familiar account of his disgust at the sins of priests and bishops, disappointing advocates of abuse survivors who found his remarks too tepid and disconnected from concrete plans to take action.
“I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church charged with responsibility for their protection and education,” Francis said at Dublin Castle. There, he met with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who called on Francis to use his “office and influence” to safeguard children in Ireland and around the world.
“The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — adequately to address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community,” the pope added. “I myself share those sentiments.”
As recently as a few weeks ago, the pope’s visit to Ireland mostly promised an awkward encounter in an estranged relationship. Since the last papal visit — by John Paul II in 1979 — Ireland, once a cornerstone of the church, has abandoned its teachings by legalizing divorce and same-sex marriage. The prime minister is gay, and just a few months ago, Ireland voted to lift a ban on abortion.
But the sex abuse scandal has lent increasing urgency to the pope’s visit, casting a shadow beyond Ireland to the heart of the Vatican, where it threatens to tarnish the legacy and remaining influence of Pope Francis.
Well into his fifth year as pope, Francis has focused on championing migrants, the poor and the disenfranchised, shifting the church’s emphasis away from divisive social issues like abortion and toward a more inclusive, pastoral style.
That mission is imperiled by his slow response to a scandal that some of his top advisers argue is the central issue facing the church.
For decades, the Vatican’s top officials covered up abuse. It took the explosion of the first sex abuse crisis in the United States in the early 2000s to get the church to pay attention.
Pope Benedict XVI eventually began ridding the church of what he called the “filth” of abusive priests, but an attitude of denial pervaded in the Vatican, where many considered the scandal the creation of an aggressive, anti-Catholic media.
By the time Francis was elected in 2013, many officials had come to acknowledge the scandal for the global and institutional threat that it was, though many more considered the problem solved by new vetting procedures.
Francis instead promised to tackle what many advocates consider the core of the issue by insisting on accountability for the bishops in the hierarchy who covered up abuse. But talk of special tribunals for bishops and other tough, centralized measures evaporated, and advocates grew so disillusioned with the pope’s lack of action that some quit his pontifical commissions in protest.
Francis, who this month apologized for the church’s “delayed” response to the crisis, himself came late to it.
It was only in January, amid the uproar over his reflexive trust in a Chilean bishop and his doubting of Chilean abuse survivors, that Francis has begun to act more decisively, sending investigators, accepting resignations of top Chilean bishops and promising victims there would be further measures.
But more cases of abuse and cover-up keep coming to light.
The more than 1,000 cases of abuse discovered over 70 years in Pennsylvania, the accusations against Theodore E. McCarrick, former cardinal of Washington, and the cover-ups of abuse in Chile have all cast a pall over the pope’s busy schedule and the triennial world meeting.
Before the trip, Francis made it clear that he viewed the secrecy, ambition and self-preservation that came with a culture of clericalism — priests who put themselves above their parishioners — as the root cause of the crime. For years, he has scorned priests who raise themselves as unreachable elites invested with authority.
“To say ‘no’ to abuse is to say an emphatic ‘no’ to all forms of clericalism,” Francis wrote in a remarkable letter of apology to all Catholics last week.
Critics say that is not enough.
“The actions of the church do not match the words,” Marie Collins, a former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said at the world meeting’s panel on safeguarding children. “And in fact they are totally opposite.”
She called the pope’s speech in Ireland on Saturday “disappointing — nothing new.”
Others said the situation was even worse outside the United States, Ireland and a few other countries and urged the pope to do something.
“Words are sweet,” said another panelist, Gabriel Dy-Liacco, a Filipino psychologist who sits on the pope’s commission, “but love means deeds.”
Speaking in front of advocates for abuse survivors who have criticized him for doing too little, Francis on Saturday cited the outrage expressed in a 2010 letter by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and the measures Benedict had demanded.
“His frank and decisive intervention continues to serve as an incentive for the efforts of the church’s leadership both to remedy past mistakes and to adopt stringent norms meant to ensure that they do not happen again,” Francis said, adding that in his letter this month to all Catholics, “I reiterated this commitment, or rather, a greater commitment to eliminating this scourge in the church — at whatever cost.”
On stage only a few feet from the pope, Varadkar, the prime minister, gave a forceful criticism of the church’s sins that many wished the pope would deliver.
“In place of Christian charity, forgiveness and compassion, far too often there was judgment, severity and cruelty, in particular, towards women and children and those on the margins,” he said, citing “stains” such as child abuse, illegal adoptions, forced labor and other sins. “People kept in dark corners, behind closed doors, cries for help that went unheard.”
Advocates, church officials and some clerics have articulated a wish list of what should happen. Among the demands are that each church diocese publish the names of abusive priests and hand over church records to civil law enforcement instead of fighting subpoenas.
Some have urged working with courts to aid, rather than hinder, prosecutions of abusive priests and ceasing efforts to indemnify the church from financial penalties. Others have called for the enshrining of zero-tolerance policies into the church’s canon law so that it can be enforced globally, not only in specific countries.
As the sex abuse scandal exploded once again before the pope’s trip, a fierce debate about those contributing factors raged in Catholic journals and across churches.
But the one factor many seemed to agree on is that clericalism, from the seminaries to the top of the hierarchy, is insidious.
Ireland knows the ravages of clericalism first hand, from its sex abuse scandals to forcing the adoption of the children of unwed mothers to many other exploitations of what was for decades authoritarian power.
The abuses the clergy committed, and their tendency to seek exaltation by parishioners instead of humbly serving and accompanying them through troubles, cost the church a country where it once had more than 90 percent attendance at mass. Now it has about 30 percent.
On Saturday, as small clusters of supporters cheered the pope on sparsely populated streets, Francis sought to build a new church with his trademark pastoral style. He joked about marital spats and shared homespun wisdom with newlyweds, encouraged homeless people at a Capuchin monastery and rallied thousands at a World Meeting of Families event in a Dublin stadium.
On Sunday, he is expected to pray alongside the faithful at Ireland’s holiest sanctuary in Knock and celebrate Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, where a third of the Irish population turned out for Pope John Paul II.
The pope’s advisers have warned that the church’s future depends on its success in addressing the existential threat of the abuse crisis. The pope privately met with abuse survivors on Saturday and publicly expressed his hope in Dublin Castle “that the gravity of the abuse scandals, which have cast light on the failings of many, will serve to emphasize the importance of the protection of minors and vulnerable adults on the part of society as a whole.”
But his flock worried the message was not strong enough.
“People are looking more for actions rather than words,” said Tony Kelly, 58, as he waited for Francis to arrive in his popemobile outside the St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, a church where Catholic bishops once prostrated themselves in penance for the sex abuse crisis and where Francis dispensed advice to young Catholic couples.
The Irish church, Kelly said, had suffered the consequences of “living in the past” and breaking its trust with the faithful with “a lot of cover up.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.