The Vatican is on the defense after reports that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, allowed a pedophile priest to resume his work after a five month suspension and just days after beginning psychiatric treatment for pedophilia.

A memo discovered by The New York Times confirms Ratzinger led a meeting, as archbishop of Munich at the time, where he approved Rev. Peter Hullermann's transfer to Munich for therapy Jan. 15, 1980. 

Six years later a German court convicted Hullermann of molesting boys in a new location, the town of Grafing, where he was transferred after completing therapy. After an 18-month suspension, Hullermann resumed working until his duties were suspended in March 2010, when he was accused of breaking a ban on working with children. 

Hullermann's case marks another abuse scandal linked to Ratzinger while he led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005. According to the Vatican, the group works "to promote and safeguard the doctrine on the faith and morals throughout the Catholic world." As the Church's disciplinary office, it determines if priests should be tried and defrocked.

In another case The New York Times reported Wednesday, the Congregation, while under Ratzinger's leadership, refused to punish Rev. Lawrence Murphy after he was accused of molesting 200 boys between 1950 and 1975 at St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis. 

In response to the article, Vatican spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi issued a statement Wednesday denying Ratzinger's knowledge of the case until decades after.

"During the mid-1970s, some of Father Murphy's victims reported his abuse to civil authorities, who investigated him at that time; however, according to news reports, that investigation was dropped. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not informed of the matter until some twenty years later," said Lombardi.

In 1996, two decades after the alleged abuse, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee wrote to Ratzinger about the case. But his letters were not returned until eight months later, when Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the second-in-command at the Congregation, told Weakland to begin a secret trial against Murphy.

Before the trial could began, Murphy wrote to Ratzinger saying he had repented and was in poor health, and handling the case was "beyond the church's own statute of limitations." Murphy was never tried by the church and died in 1998.

In another scandal damaging to the Church, a Catholic bishop in Ireland apologized earlier this week for ignoring complaints of abuse in his diocese.

Father William Lee of Waterford, Ireland, said he did not file criminal complaints or fire a priest who was accused twice of sexual abuse in the mid-1990s, and called his response "seriously inadequate."