With regards to the Pope, it seems to me that liberals are often derided for being too deferential to Muslim beliefs. But disrespect the Pope and you’re a heathen!
I think liberals tend to differentiate between criticizing people and criticizing beliefs. i.e. they can criticize the Pope as much as they want and they don’t see it as anti-Catholic at all. Criticize Catholic beliefs in a more general sense and that’s anti-Catholic and they try to avoid it. But that ignores beliefs such as Papal infallibility which join the two together. So you either are criticizing beliefs to some degree, or you never bothered to learn much about the beliefs you’re trying to avoid criticizing. With regard to religions with widely decentralized heirarchies, it’s easier to make that liberal distinction. You can criticize Islamic leaders as much as you want because they aren’t ever much more than local clerics anyway–so you often don’t bother to criticize them because who cares and nobody knows who they are anyway.