So the news that broke earlier this week, after photographs revealed three LDS Church missionaries allegedly mocking Catholicism and vandalizing a shrine in San Luis, Colo., has left the Colorado Springs mission president more than shocked.

"I can tell you story after story that's noble and uplifting and, of course, this is just the opposite," said Fotheringham, who's served this mission for about 2 1/2 years. The behavior depicted in these pictures, taken in August 2006 and discovered on the Internet by a Sangre de Cristo parishoner late last week, is "so counter to the regular pattern that it's just stunning."

Two former missionaries, and one whose call has now been terminated, reportedly snapped pictures of themselves preaching behind a church altar, while waving a Book of Mormon, pretending to sacrifice one another and holding the head of a Mexican saint whom one missionary claimed to have decapitated. The photos, taken at the Stations of the Cross, the Chapel of All Saints and the Shrine of the Mexican Martyrs - all located on a mesa overlooking San Luis - were found on Photobucket, a Web site. They have since been taken down, but their discovery and their impact continue to rock the small southern Colorado town and have set online chatrooms ablaze.

Many entries, including those on The Salt Lake Tribune Web site, are cries of outrage and dismay, sentiments echoed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has issued an apology, promised disciplinary action and vowed to seek ways to restore goodwill. But handfuls of writers are swapping stories of similar behavior from their own mission experiences.

Though people may chalk the behavior up to immaturity, typical of the age, this explanation doesn't fly for Fotheringham.

"It's not enough for people to say they're just 19 years of age," the mission president said. "They're held to a much higher standard, and that's part of the disappointment."

The events in Colorado raise the question: Are Mormon missionaries properly equipped, through training, to go out into the field and uphold this higher standard?

Mark Tuttle, spokesman for the LDS Church, said in a written statement that Missionary Training Centers teach missionaries "to respect people of all faiths, to be sensitive to doctrines and beliefs that other religions hold sacred, and to obey the law. Once in the mission field, mission presidents provide additional training on local customs and traditions."

A former Provo MTC Finnish teacher, Anthony John, said he wasn't aware of a "regimented senstivity training" and believed the responsibility rested primarily on individual teachers. He, for instance, remembered offering do-and-don't tips to his students and discussing the predominance of the Lutheran faith in Finland, a tradition that needed to be respected. His own mission president, he added, encouraged him and the other missionaries to visit and simply take in other churches on their free, or preparation, days.

"A lot of them were very impressive," said John, 27, who's working on a master's in organizational psychology in Missouri. "Even as a Mormon person," visiting other houses of worship "doesn't mean I can't have a religious experience."

It's one thing, however, to be heading to a foreign country, where obvious cultural differences are fodder for discussion and where missionaries spend many more weeks in training, in large part because they're learning new languages. John had his students for 11 weeks; missionaries who don't need language training, he said, only attend the MTC for three weeks. But Fotheringham was quick to recite from the missionary handbook a line oft-repeated and meant to guide behavior for the more than 53,000 full-time Mormon missionaries who span the globe: "Respect the culture, customs, traditions, religious beliefs and practices, and sacred sites in the area where you serve."

Perhaps nowhere have the repercussions of ignoring these guidelines been more salient than they were in Thailand in 1972.

Only four years after the Thailand Mission was established, two LDS Church missionaries touring an ancient and famous Buddhist temple area whipped out cameras and snapped photos that sparked an international incident and landed them in jail for six months.

R. Lanier Britsch, a retired Brigham Young University history professor and author of From the East: The History of the Latter-Day Saints in Asia, 1851-1996, recounted the story of what happened.

He said the young men were walking through the ruins, "a highly venerated place," when they came upon a large Buddha statue that was easily accessible. One elder climbed onto the statue, straddled the Buddha's neck, placed his hands on the Buddha's head (the top of which "represents the Buddha's enlightenment, his expanded capability,. . .thus making the head the most sacred part of his body," Britsch explained) and smiled for the camera.

The Thai store proprietor who was later asked to develop the film was so upset when he saw the images that he submitted them to a newspaper. The two young men "paid a rather severe price for the indiscretion," serving six months in a Thai jail, and the incident "set the church back for many years" in that part of the world, Britsch said. And this, he added, wasn't an event that left anything broken.

What happened in Colorado, he said, "sounds like zealous antagonism," worse than the "momentary cultural insensitivity" that happened in southeast Asia.

"I find it unconscionable and extremely difficult to explain," Britsch said.

As for what punishment seems appropriate for these three missionaries who served in Colorado, the historian speculated that that will take care of itself.

"Their souls are going to be roasted for years over this. I don't think anyone else is going to have to put their feet to the fire.. . . They're going to feel so stupid."

-- Jessica Ravitz can be reached at jravitz@sltrib.com or 801-257-8776. Send comments to the religion editor at religioneditor@sltrib.com.