Dublin, Ireland ? Pope John Paul II has defrocked two priests convicted of sexually abusing children in Ireland, an unprecedented move in this predominantly Catholic nation, church officials confirmed Thursday.

“The diocese confirms that two priests, previously convicted of child sexual abuse, have been dismissed from the clerical state,” said the Rev. John Carroll, spokesman for Ireland’s southeast Ferns Diocese, which has been hard hit by sex abuse scandals.

The church declined to identify either man, but only two priests from the Ferns diocese have been convicted of such abuse: James Doyle and Donal Collins. Collins received a four-year sentence in 1998 for abusing several boys; Doyle received a one-year suspended sentence in 1990 for abusing one boy.

The church rarely defrocks priests, even those found guilty of crimes, and the decision was the first time the Vatican has dismissed a priest in Ireland over sexual abuse.

In this case, Ferns Bishop Eamonn Walsh sent a file to the Vatican requesting the two men’s dismissal, a request granted last month by the pope in what Carroll called “a supreme decision” that cannot be appealed.

The announcement came shortly before the government’s expected publication of an investigation into how state agencies and church leaders mishandled abuse allegations in Ferns from the 1970s to 1990s. The most notorious priest, the Rev. Sean Fortune, committed suicide in 1999 while awaiting trial on 66 criminal counts of molesting and raping boys over nearly two decades.

Ferns’ previous bishop, Brendan Comiskey, resigned in 2002 after conceding he had done too little to stop the abuse being committed by Fortune and about a half-dozen other priests.

While bishops have the power to suspend priests from duty — a much more common practice — only the pope has the power to remove them from the priesthood. The Vatican provides no global statistics on the number of priests it has dismissed.

Several priests in the United States have been defrocked — a punishment the Roman Catholic Church prefers to call laicization — over sexual abuse since the issue erupted into crisis in 2002.

Sex abuse scandals have taken their toll on the Catholic Church from Canada to Australia. But no nation has been harder hit than Ireland, which specialized in exporting priests worldwide until the 1980s.