BERLIN?The pope's elder brother, Georg Ratzinger, said Tuesday that alleged sexual abuse at the German choir school in the 1950s and 1960s he worked at for 29 years was "never discussed".

Ratzinger, 86, who ran the Domspatzen choir attached to the boarding school from 1964 to 1993, said: "Things like this were never discussed... At the beginning of my time there were a lot of problems with the reorganization of the choir, which were the main focus of interest.

"No, the problem of sexual abuse that has now come to light was never discussed," he told the Passauer Neue Presse daily in an interview.

The Domspatzen, a thousand-year-old choir in Regensburg, Bavaria, last week became the latest Catholic institution in Germany to become enmeshed in scandal about sexual abuse, which allegedly took place several decades ago.

The director and composer Franz Wittenbrink, a former pupil of the boarding school attached to the choir, told Spiegel magazine there was an "ingenious system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure."

He accused a former head of the school of "taking two or three boys into his room in the evenings," giving them wine and masturbating with them.

The school said in a letter to parents published on its website last week that a child had been abused in the 1950s, and that it was trying to contact a choirboy during the 1960s who had claimed in a newspaper he was molested.

A spokesman for the Regensburg bishopric, Clemens Neck, told AFP that it had further "information about alleged abuse between 1958 and 1973".

Ratzinger said that he was also unaware of the extent to which the headmaster of the school from 1953 to 1992, named only as M., beat the pupils, and that he was powerless to do much about it.

"I did not know about the extent of the brute force used by headmaster M. If I had known what excessive violence he was using, I would have said something," he said.

Ratzinger, who is four years older than his more famous brother Joseph, now Pope Benedict XVI, added that he himself had administered "clips round the ear" during choir practice.

"At the beginning I administered clips round the ear, but I always had a bad conscience about it. I was happy when in 1980 corporal punishment was banned by law," he said.

Such activity is condemned much more these days "because people have become more sensitive. I too do that. At the same time, I ask the victims for forgiveness," he said.

The scandal has snowballed to engulf several Catholic schools around the country, as more and more alleged victims come forward.

None of the priests concerned is expected to face criminal charges because the alleged crimes took place too long ago, but there have been growing calls for a change in the law and for the Church to pay compensation to victims.