Pope hears wounds of Ireland's abused, and vows to speak

Knock (Ireland): Pope Francis visited a famous shrine on Sunday in Ireland and was to celebrate a Mass dedicated to families after an emotional meeting with Irish victims of clerical sex abuse and those wrenched away from their mothers in forced adoptions demanded by Catholic authorities.

Francis arrived Sunday in Knock, the Marian shrine in northwestern Ireland, where he prayed and blessed thousands of jubilant Irish faithful, who gathered in raincoats under clouds.

On Saturday, the first day of his visit, Francis spent 90 minutes meeting with victims of clerical and institutional abuse, including two people who were forcibly given up for adoption as newborns because their mothers weren't married.

They are some of the thousands of Irish children taken from their mothers who were then forced to go live and work in laundries and other workhouses for "fallen women."

One of them, Clodagh Malone, said Francis was "shocked" at what they told him and "he listened to each and every one of us with respect and compassion."

The survivors asked Francis to speak out on Sunday to let all the mothers know that they did nothing wrong and that it wasn't a sin as church officials have told them to try to find their children later in life.

They said the Argentine pope understood well their plight, given Argentina's own history of forced adoptions of children born to purported leftists during its 1970s military dictatorship.

"That is a big step forward for a lot of elderly women, particularly in the countryside in Ireland who have lived 30, 40, 50, 60 years in fear," another adoptee, Paul Redmond, told The Associated Press.

"That would mean a lot to them." Francis' first day in Ireland was dominated by the abuse scandal and Ireland's fraught history of atrocities committed in the name of preserving and purifying the Catholic faith. He received a lukewarm reception on the streets, but tens of thousands of people thronged Dublin's Croke Park Stadium for a family rally featuring Ireland's famous Riverdance performers and tenor Andrea Boccelli.

Francis' visit had originally been intended to celebrate Catholic families at the close of the Vatican's once-every-three-years World Meeting of Families. But it has been overshadowed by the abuse scandal, which has devastated the church's reputation in Ireland since the 1990s and has exploded anew in the US following accusations of misconduct and cover-up by members of the US hierarchy.

The US scandal took on a new twist on Sunday, with a former Vatican ambassador to the US purportedly penning a letter accusing Vatican officials of knowing about the sexual escapades of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick since 2000, but making him a cardinal anyway.

The letter attributed to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano was published Sunday by two conservative outlets, the National Catholic Reporter and LifeSiteNews. Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month after a US church investigation determined an accusation he molested a minor was "credible."

But in the letter, Vigano said McCarrick had been initially sanctioned by the Vatican in 2009 or 2010 but that Francis rehabilitated him in 2013 despite being informed of McCarrick's penchant to invite young seminarians into his bed.