BERLIN?A Catholic convent school that closed in 1981 was on Wednesday the latest religious institution to become enmeshed in a child sex abuse scandal now involving over two-thirds of Germany's dioceses.

The diocese of Mainz near Frankfurt said that it had preliminary indications that two people abused pupils boarding at the Bensheim convict in the 1970s. State prosecutors have been informed, a statement said.

The scandal first erupted in January when an elite Jesuit school in Berlin admitted the systematic sexual abuse of its pupils by two priests in the 1970s and 1980s, and has now engulfed 19 of Germany's 27 dioceses.

Also implicated is a boarding school attached to the Domspatzen ("Cathedral Sparrows"), Regensburg cathedral's thousand-year-old choir run for 29 years by Georg Ratzinger, brother of the German-born pope, Benedict XVI.

Most of the priests concerned are not 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.

The German scandal is one of several to have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years, most notably in Ireland where one priest admitted sexually abusing more than 100 children, and this week in Austria and the Netherlands.

Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the Vatican, said on Tuesday that German, Austrian and Dutch Church leaders had acted "rapidly and decisively", stressing that sexual abuse also went far beyond church walls.

The chairman of the German Bishops Conference, Robert Zollitsch, was to meet the pope on Friday at the Vatican to discuss the cases.