“People just stopped going. Even people in my parents’ generation,” said Ms. Murray, who had priests in her family and who voted to change the Constitution on abortion.

A few days later, Dermot Ahern, a former foreign minister, said to similar outrage that Cardinal Sodano had suggested to him in 2004 that the Irish government should indemnify the church against court-ordered compensation for victims of abuse.

The Vatican has not responded to the allegations. But Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, recognized the danger of the abuse scandal in 2010, when he sent an extraordinary pastoral letter to Catholics in Ireland sharing in their “sense of betrayal,” but also lamenting a “secularization of Irish society” that had prompted “a loss of respect for the church.”

That blaming of secularization for Ireland’s drift, rather than the church’s abuses, is still prevalent within the Vatican hierarchy.

“It’s an historical evolution that you have to know how to accept. Society goes like this,” said Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, a former president of the governatorate of Vatican City State. He recalled the biblical story of Gideon, whose large army diminished to a “strong, decisive” few. “So now the church of Ireland loses a little bit of what was its ethnic constitution but gains a more spiritual element. Who is Catholic there is Catholic not because he is Irish, but because he believes.”

Catholic traditionalists, who argue that Francis has confused true believers with his silence ahead of the abortion referendum and with his inclusive message to gay people and the divorced, are holding a parallel meeting days before he arrives. They are incensed that the Vatican has invited the Rev. James Martin, an American Jesuit priest, to give a talk at the official meeting about how parishes can better accept and reach out to gay Catholics.