Pope apologizes for ‘grave scandal’ during visit to Ireland
who joined other neighbors living near the papal route to cheer on the pontiff.
She admires Francis, but like other Irish she has seen documentary after documentary about scandals within the church. About the sexual abuse of children by priests, about unwed mothers serving unofficial sentences of hard labor in laundries, of abuse in orphanages and other institutions.
“I have great faith in God, but I don’t have faith in the church, “added Caroline Carrick.
Such sentiments have only been reinforced in Ireland with this month’s release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report citing wide-scale sexual abuse and coverup in six dioceses, including Pittsburgh and Greensburg.
The Pennsylvania report resonated strongly here with Irish who have read similar official accounts closer to home.
So an undertone of melancholy surrounded Pope Francis’ arrival in Dublin on Saturday morning for the international gathering known as the World Meeting of Families. The conference, which occurs every three years and supports church teachings about the family, typically draws the pope at its conclusion, as it did in Philadelphia in 2015.
His two-day visit is set to culminate with an open-air Mass before up to 500,000 people Sunday afternoon.
Like the partly sunny, partly cloudy skies above him Saturday, the visit by Francis had its upbeat moments amid the gloom.
As is his trademark, Francis made a point of greeting disabled people in the crowds. He visited the needy at a church social-service center. He spoke on family and forgiveness at a Saturday night festival that featured a 500-strong Riverdance cast performing traditional Irish steps.
But the elephant in the room was named early and often.
Francis was barely off the plane before offering an abject apology for the sexual abuse of children by priests and other scandals that have horrified an increasingly post-Catholic Ireland.
By day’s end he had met with victims whose very description lays out the stunningly vast landscape of woundedness in a country where traditionally so many institutions were run by the church.
Among them were those victimized in parishes and in church-run orphanages, schools, seminaries and homes for unwed mothers and their children.
As he heard their stories, participants said, the pope was visibly moved and even referred to those responsible as “caca,” a blunt word for excrement in Francis’ native Spanish.
Earlier at Dublin Castle, the Irish government’s seat of power, he said he “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.”
He added: “The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share these sentiments.”
Francis also acknowledged without specifics the “women who in the past have endured particularly difficult situations. “
Members of the international group Ending Clergy Abuse said in an evening news conference they were experiencing “apology fatigue” from popes. What they want is action. Peter Isely of Wisconsin said that wIth a “stroke of a pen” Francis could implement a zerotolerance policy for abusive priests throughout the world.
Currently, only in the United States must an abuser be banned from ministry for a single offense under church law, according to members of the survivors group, which includes an expert in church law. That resulted from special Vatican action following the “Spotlight” revelations of abuse in Boston and elsewhere in 2002.
Also, the pope could ban all bishops and cardinals who cover up abuse, Mr. Isely said.
Mark Vincent Healy, an Irish survivor of abuse, said the pope’s words did not form a bond with victims of abuse. It was important to do so, he said, in a historically overwhelmingly Catholic country where the scandal “has dramatically and profoundly affected our sense of what being Irish was.”
Survivors weren’t the only critics of the pope. Protesters in spots around Dublin called for the church to accept gay marriage and women priests.
This is the first visit to Irish soil in nearly four decades by any pope, and the first up-close chance to let a pope know what they think about things.
When St. John Paul II came here in 1979, the country overwhelmingly turned out in a display of closely fused Irish and Catholic identity.
All the scandals were in the future.
So too were referendums legalizing divorce, gay marriage and most recently abortion.
Ireland’s first openly gay prime minister, Leo Eric Varadkar, greeted Francis warmly but with reservations about the legacy of the church’s outsized role in Irish society.
“The Ireland of the 21st century is a very different place today than it was in the past. Ireland is increasingly diverse,” he told the pontiff at Dublin Castle.
Mr. Varadkar noted that nearly four-fifths of people in the republic still identify as Catholic.
But he defended Ireland’s trajectory and increased religious pluralism and called for a “new covenant” between church and state, one in which the Catholic Church has a role but not one as central as before.
Meanwhile, Catholics try to keep the faith.
Paddy Spaine joined his family, including his father and 9-year-old son on Navan Road to cheer on Pope Francis as his motorcade went by.
He said it is good for Francis “just being here” and believes he will “follow up on things happening in the church and get to the bottom of things. “
Mr. Spaine is firm in his faith and says that abuse can “happen in any setting, not just the church.” But, he added: “You think you’ve heard the worst, and the next day you hear something worse than that.”