DUBLIN — Nearly 40 years since the last papal visit to Ireland, Pope Francis arrived Saturday to a transformed country where the once-mighty Roman Catholic Church is in tatters — its authority eroded by deepening secularization and a global sex abuse crisis challenging Francis' papacy.

With recent revelations of institutional cover-ups of sexual abuse in the United States and Chile, many Catholics had hoped that Francis, who has struggled throughout his tenure to grasp the enormity of the scourge, would use the wreckage of the Irish church as a backdrop to announce muscular new measures to protect children in his church.

Instead, on the first day of his two-day visit here for the ninth World Meeting of Families event, he offered a familiar account of his disgust at the sins of priests and bishops, disappointing advocates of abuse survivors who found his remarks too tepid and disconnected from concrete plans to take action.

"I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church charged with responsibility for their protection and education," Francis said at Dublin Castle. There, he met with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who called on Francis to use his "office and influence" to safeguard children in Ireland and around the world.

"The failure of ecclesiastical authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — adequately to address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community," the pope added. "I myself share those sentiments."

But the sex abuse scandal has lent increasing urgency to the pope's visit.

Francis, who this month apologized for the church's "delayed" response to the crisis, himself came late to it.

It was only in January, amid the uproar over his reflexive trust in a Chilean bishop and his doubting of Chilean abuse survivors, that Francis has begun to act more decisively, sending investigators, accepting resignations of top Chilean bishops and promising victims there would be further measures.

But more cases of abuse and cover-up keep coming to light.

The more than 1,000 cases of abuse discovered over 70 years in Pennsylvania, the accusations against Theodore E. McCarrick, former cardinal of Washington, and the cover-ups of abuse in Chile have all cast a pall over the pope's busy schedule.

"The actions of the church do not match the words," Marie Collins, a former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said at the world meeting's panel on safeguarding children. "And in fact they are totally opposite."

She called the pope's speech in Ireland on Saturday "disappointing — nothing new."