I was reading letters to the editor in today's Chicago Tribune. Most of them concerned the Trib, on Sunday, publishing an old cartoon depicting a "church" called St. Paedophilia, and a bunch of priests bursting from its entrance, chasing young boys.

Readers appeared to be highly offended, and were comparing it to the cartoons that were published in the Danish newspaper depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

I didn't see the latter cartoons - the Trib declined to publish them, and to be truthful, I don't really feel the need to go looking for them on the internet (where I'm certain I can find them, if I care to). But the idea that the two are analogous did not seem accurate to me.

If they were to be analogous, they'd have to be showing a group of imams, perhaps. Perhaps the Ayatollah. Something along those lines. To offend equally, they'd have to have shown a caricature of Jesus chasing little boys. That would be terribly offensive to most Christians, and most Catholics, surely. And there would be no basis for such a cartoon, so I doubt we'd ever see it.

Far as I know, Moslems do not generally hold a mainstream belief in killing or dying or violence as a means to an end. So it's understandable that such a cartoon would be highly offensive to them. And I doubt that most Moslems are advocating hunting down the Danish cartoonists and murdering them as revenge for those cartoons.

I understand there are subtle differences - no one in the Catholic Church is claiming any Biblical justification for the priests' actions, unlike the terrorists, who claim that they are acting on the words of the Koran. But if we Christians/Catholics can take offense at a cartoon depicting priests, then at least we should be able to understand to a degree Moslems' reactions to those Danish cartoons...