Similar scandals have erupted elsewhere during the pope’s tenure, including in Chile and Australia.

Ireland has its own history of sexual abuse committed by clerics and other emotionally wrenching church scandals, most notably the mistreatment of women and girls in the notorious Magdalene Laundries, the for-profit church institutions that survived through much of the 20th century.

Mr. Burke said at a Vatican news conference that Francis, the first pope to visit Ireland in nearly 40 years, would set aside time to meet with victims of sexual abuse during his visit on Saturday and Sunday. He said it would be up to the victims to decide afterward if they wished to speak publicly.

“The important thing for the pope, in these moments, is that it be a moment of prayer, of silence, of listening,” Mr. Burke said.

The pope has been accused of reacting slowly to well-known sexual abuses by priests. On Monday, in an extraordinarily frank letter addressed to all Catholics, Francis assailed the abuses as atrocities committed against children.

“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives,” he wrote in the 2,000-word letter. “We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”