CNN: The last time a Pope came to Ireland was 1979, and Colm O’Gorman remembers tuning into live television coverage of the visit from his family’s home in County Wexford.
The teenager watched with rapt attention as Pope John Paul II celebrated a “youth Mass” in the harbor city of Galway like a rock star, declaring in his homily to a festival-like crowd of hundreds of thousands: “Young people of Ireland, I love you.”
A year and a half later O’Gorman was raped for the first time by a Catholic priest.
“When I look back at that visit and see now how it has been remembered, I think about myself at age 13. I was going to Catholic school, I was an altar boy, the youth group I went to took place in a convent. Everything I did, my whole life, the Church was at the center of it,” O’Gorman said.
“And I think about how Pope John Paul II said he loved me — well, he didn’t.”
This weekend will be a moment of reckoning for survivors in Ireland and across the world, as Pope Francis arrives for the first papal visit to the country in nearly four decades amid an intensifying outcry over Church-related abuse scandals.
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