DUBLIN — Nearly 40 years since the last papal visit to Ireland, Pope Francis arrived on 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.

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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.