Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI has met with Ireland's top churchmen following the publication of a damning report detailing decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at church-run reform schools in Ireland.
The Vatican says they briefed the pope on the report.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi says Benedict expressed his solidarity with the victims in the meeting Friday with Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh and Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.
The Irish government-funded independent report last month detailed "endemic" molestation and rape at church-run boys facilities and ritualized beatings at girls' schools from the 1930s to the 1990s.