Not surprisingly, the Vatican is trying to control the damage in Ireland. The pope has organized a team of top churchmen from outside the country, who are traveling through Ireland now and who will reportedly investigate not just its abuse scandal but also its system for training priests and running parishes. Martin Long, spokesman for the Irish Bishops’ Conference, described this “visitation” as “an offer of assistance from the holy father, and it is welcome.” But it, too, has angered many in Ireland, who say that it is precisely the sort of top-down approach that has put the church into its current state. The Rev. John Littleton, onetime head of the defunct National Conference of Priests of Ireland and a prominent Catholic voice in the country, said bluntly, “We don’t need help from Rome.” The Rev. Sean McDonagh, a leader of the Association of Irish Priests, which formed last year after the reports were published, suggested that to get at the root of the problem, the team of investigators “should begin by scrutinizing Rome’s own handling of sex-abuse allegations.”

The Rev. Donald Cozzens, an American priest who is one of the most-respected moderate voices on Catholic issues, outlined the church’s wider problem in these terms: “I’m not aware of any major diocese in the world that has not had a sexual-abuse scandal, and I believe part of the problem lies with the very structures of the church. I don’t want to say change would require a different pope or even a different culture, but it will require radical openness. We have to take an honest look at all the things that are in play. Is mandatory celibacy wise or even theologically sound?”

In proportion to its population, Ireland easily ranks as the country with the most reported cases of sex abuse within the church. It is second only to the United States in the total number of cases, despite a population approximately one-hundredth that of the U.S. Of the two reports published in 2009 detailing the findings of civil investigations, the so-called Ryan Report examined abuse in institutions that were run by the Catholic Church, while the Murphy Report detailed abuse within the Diocese of Dublin. The reports fill five volumes and run more than 2,500 pages. Sample entries from the Murphy Report include an account of a priest who digitally raped a girl during confession and then washed his hands in a bowl at the altar; a priest who probed a girl vaginally and anally with a crucifix; and a priest who routinely forced altar boys to drop their pants and beat them and then masturbated. The Ryan Report entries that detail the desolate existence of the mostly poor children in so-called industrial schools read like a cross between Charles Dickens and Dan Brown: “I was beaten and hospitalized by the head brother and not allowed to go to my father’s funeral in case my bruises were seen” and “I was tied to a cross and raped while others masturbated at the side.”

The Murphy Commission — headed by Yvonne Murphy, a circuit-court judge — noted in its report that as cases of abuse became public, church officials repeated the refrain that they had not dealt with abusers properly because they were on “a learning curve.” The commission roundly dismissed that claim. The interests of church officials “were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets,” the report concluded. “All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.”

Maeve Lewis, executive director of One in Four, a counseling and advocacy center for victims of abuse, said that “on paper the church is now ahead of the state in putting policies in place to protect children.” The Rev. John Littleton, the former president of an Irish priests’ organization, agreed with this, saying that when a priest prepares to celebrate Mass at a church in Ireland today, he would never be alone with a server, provided the church’s new guidelines for protecting children are implemented. Then again, Lewis said that based on her watchdog experience: “Many churchmen in fact feel very hard done by the reports. They don’t accept the reports at all.”

Martin Long, the Irish bishops’ spokesman, told me that the church is not just paying lip service on the abuse issue. “Acknowledgments have been made that the actions of church representatives resulted in the institution being placed above the welfare of individuals,” he said. He then went on, however, to restate the learning-curve theme, suggesting that church officials had shielded abusers at the expense of children because “the deviousness and level of duplicity that perpetrators of abuse exercised was not understood for a long time,” a reading of the situation to which abuse victims have repeatedly reacted with scorn. Nevertheless, Long insisted that today things have finally changed: “The bishops get it, to use an Americanism.”

Do the church authorities get it?

Last March, Pope Benedict issued a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, which was much anticipated as the Vatican’s definitive response to the crisis. Beyond authorizing the visitation of churchmen from outside Ireland, the letter called on Irish Catholics to pray, to fast and to engage in “eucharistic adoration.” When I asked Long what plans there are for rebuilding the Church in Ireland, he said that the pastoral letter “will be the core of the pastoral renewal.” Bishop Eamonn Walsh likewise told me that the Irish bishops’ plan for renewal will focus on prayer, fasting and alms-giving.