It's not that I always agree with the Pontiff. Last year I drew a cartoon critical of him for barring the ordination of women (left). Legions of conservative Long Island Catholics lit up the switchboard at Newsday, the paper where I work. My editors apologized in print for the cartoon. I defended it in print. My publisher was displeased. The staff was divided. It wasn't pretty.

Over the years I've probably had more cartoons on religion spiked than on any other subject -- from one showing Christ carrying an electric chair up Golgotha to another drawn when New York's Cardinal John O'Connor hired a public relations firm to bolster the Church's worldly image in regards to abortion. It showed a Cardinal O'Connor figure commenting on the Crucifixion to a Roman soldier saying, "He should've hired a good PR firm!"

As a true son of what Flannery O'Connor called "the Christ-haunted South," I have never shied away from religion or its symbols in my drawings. I grew up in small towns so backward even the Episcopalians handled snakes. Being raised Southern Baptist gave me a special radar for the foibles of tinhorn Protestant pontiffs -- those sawdust-trail divines like Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart -- and I go after them with gleeful abandon. In my comic strip "Kudzu," a preacher, Rev.Will B. Dunn, is featured prominently. But since all public figures are fair game for political cartoons, Pope John Paul II, this most public of pontiffs, has shown up in my crosshairs a few times over the years.