Pope Francis’s letter to his church on the scandals of sexual abuse is full of anger and remorse, but empty of specific policies beyond a call to prayer and fasting. This can be defended. A change of heart must come before the actions which will express it. But it is also horrifyingly late and grimly familiar. Not only have successive popes and prelates been expressing their anguish and their shame at child abuse all this century, but the scandals themselves have continued with numbing regularity. It’s almost as if the culture of the church ran deeper than the wishes of any pope.

This year opened particularly badly with Francis himself defending with angry scorn a Chilean bishop credibly accused of abuse. This did huge damage to the church’s reputation there; to his credit, he realised this and later took the accusations seriously. Since then he has sacked the bishop in question and four others, among them the man who was in charge of dealing with abuse reports, although the affair still festers: a priest involved in the reporting of abusers is now in criminal custody, but though he had confessed his crimes to his superiors in January, they somehow overlooked the possibility of reporting him to the civil authorities for six months while the scandal raged all around them.

Two of the countries where the abuse scandal has done the most damage to the church’s moral authority are the US and Ireland. Pope Francis arrives in Ireland for a two-day conference on strengthening the family on Friday. The irony has not been lost on protestors. His visit there seems likely to provide another graphic demonstration of the collapse in the church’s popularity. In the US, the publication last week of a long, horrifying report on the behaviour of the church in the state of Pennsylvania followed the exposure of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (whose nickname was “Uncle Ted”) as a serial predator on boys and young men. Pope Francis removed McCarrick as a cardinal, something that had not been done to the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien when he was exposed in 2013. So it’s a start.

But why have there been so many starts before, none of them leading anywhere? Unless statistics lie, the Catholic church is not an organisation uniquely hospitable to sexual predators or even to paedophiles. Other churches have their own horrendous scandals and cover-ups. So do other professions. But the Catholic church does seem remarkably resistant to reform. Two explanations are offered in a divided church. Conservative Catholics blame the prevalence of gay men in the priesthood; Francis, and the liberals, blame the clerical culture which leaves bishops and archbishops responsible to no one outside the church and not even to the lay people within it. Changing that, which his letter demands, would threaten the power structure of the whole church and would be very fiercely resisted. But it just might offer a chance of restoring some of its moral authority.