Next World Meeting of Families will be held in Dublin, Ireland in 2018

Church officials say the next World Meeting of Families will be held in Dublin, Ireland, In 2018.

Ireland is ground zero for the church's clergy sex abuse crisis outside of the United States. The overwhelmingly Catholic country recently legalized gay marriage.

Archbishop Eamon Martin, the Catholic primate for Ireland, says he is delighted to hear the news.

He says Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was in Philadelphia with a delegation from Ireland to hear from Francis directly.

The World Meeting of Families was held in Philadelphia this week and was the original reason that Francis decided to come to the United States.

Francis capped a 10-day trip to Cuba and the United States by celebrating a Mass in front of hundreds of thousands of people filling the streets of Philadelphia Sunday.