IRELAND
Church Times
August 10, 2018
By Gregg Ryan
POPE FRANCIS faces growing demands from individuals and organisations, including the former President Mary McAleese and Amnesty International, to acknowledge publicly the victims of child abuse by Roman Catholic clergy, before his visit to Ireland later this month.
The Pope, who is travelling to Dublin for the World Meeting of Families on 25 and 26 August, will spend only two days in Ireland, and is not expected to visit Northern Ireland.
He is scheduled to hold a rally at Croke Park, Dublin; visit the Marian shrine at Knock, Co. Mayo; and say a papal mass in Phoenix Park, the site of a similar Mass said by St John Paul II in 1979.
Pope Francis is also understood to be paying a visit to the Capuchin centre in Dublin which, under Brother Kevin Crowley, feeds hundreds of the city’s poor daily.
There are conflicting reports on whether the Pope will meet victims of clerical abuse. The RC Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, expressed hopes that such a meeting would happen; but Ireland’s Executive Director of Amnesty International, Colm O’Gorman, himself a victim, has said that nothing short of the Pope, acknowledging the truth of Ireland’s abuse scandals at the hands of churchmen and women, and the Vatican’s cover-up of the same scandals, would suffice.
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