Marktl, Germany - Blue grafitti on the birthplace of Pope Benedict XVI in Germany was quickly painted over Tuesday.
A police spokesman in nearby Rosenheim confirmed the overnight vandalism, but declined to say what had been written on the building, a former police station where Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927 in a cramped station officer's apartment.
"It was insulting," he said, and conceded that it referred to the scandal over sex abuse by Catholic priests in Europe and North America between the 1950s and 1990s. A woman passerby discovered the blue paint on the building at dawn and informed police.
Benedict turns 83 on Friday.
A rich Catholic family in Germany paid for a foundation to acquire the house in Marktl, near the Austrian border, and convert it into a birthplace museum. Benedict's family left the town not long after his birth. He grew up in another town, Traunstein.