US embassy cables released on Saturday by WikiLeaks revealed that the Vatican would not allow its officials to testify before an Irish commission investigating child abuse by clerics, according to The Guardian.
The cables revealed that the 2009 Murphy commission’s requests for information "offended many in the Vatican," who felt that the Irish government had "failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations.”
The commission substantiated many of the abuse claims despite the lack of co-operation from the Vatican, and in a report, identified 320 people who complained of child sexual abuse between 1975 and 2004 in the Dublin archdiocese.
One cable entitled "Sex abuse scandal strains Irish-Vatican relations, shakes up Irish church, and poses challenges for the Holy See" said that Vatican officials believed Irish opposition politicians to be “making political hay” from the crisis by publicly pushing the government to demand a reply from the Vatican.
Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs, the Dublin Archdiocese and the Vatican's ambassador in Rome, Giuseppe Leanza, declined to comment on the subject
The Vatican press office decried the leaks as a matter of "extreme seriousness."
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However, one of Ireland's most prominent campaigners against the Catholic Church's cover-up of child abuse, Andrew Madden, said the leaked document offered more evidence that the Vatican was concerned only about protecting itself, not about admitting the truth.
The cables also contain information regarding the Vatican's relations with the Anglican Communion, which includes the Church of England and its affiliates in more than 160 countries.
One cable reports that Britain's ambassador to the Vatican warned that the pope's invitation to disaffected Anglicans to join the Catholic Church had chilled relations between the two churches and risked inciting a violent backlash against British Catholics.
The Vatican moved last year to make it easier for traditional Anglicans upset over the appointment of female priests and gay bishops to join the Catholic Church, whose teaching holds that homosexual activity is sinful.
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