The house in which Pope Benedict XVI was born in the southern Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn has been vandalised with an “obscene” phrase painted above the main door.
The blue graffiti was discovered early yesterday, Bavarian police said in a statement.
Authorities, who estimate the damage at €1,500, have painted over the text to cover it up. Police are searching for the person who vandalised the house.
“You can presume” the graffiti was related to the sex- abuse scandal linked to the Catholic Church in Germany, police spokesman Konrad Rutzinger said by phone from southern Germany.
He declined to give details on the content of the graffiti.
The house defacement occurred three days before the German pope’s 83rd birthday in the town on the Inn River near the Austrian border. The pope was born in the three-story, 18th century house on April 16th, 1927. The building has become a museum dedicated to Benedict XVI.
A survey published this week found that a quarter of Germany's Catholics were considering quitting the church in the wake of reports of hundreds of cases, some many decades old, of sexual abuse by clerics.
Last week, clerics in Germany used Easter sermons to pray for the victims as public sentiment against the Church turned decidedly negative.
Benedict himself was drawn into the widening scandal last month when the Munich archdiocese said the pontiff, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, played a role in moving a priest later convicted of molesting boys to his diocese in 1980.
Earlier this week, the Vatican responded to criticism linked to the sex abuse scandal by publishing its guidelines for dealing with Roman Catholic clerics accused of abusing children for the first time.
Agencies