Irish singer Sinead O’Connor stands alone while the crowd boos her at Bob Dylan’s 30th anniversary celebration in New York on Oct. 16, 1992, 13 days after she ripped a photo of Pope John Paul II during an appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” left, and Pope John Paul II appears in his popemobil in Prague on April 21, 1990. More than 30 years later, her Saturday Night Live performance is remembered by some as an offensive act of desecration. But for others — including survivors of clergy sex abuse — O’Connor’s protest was prophetic, forecasting the global denomination’s public reckoning that was still to come.
Cassettes and CDs by Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor are flattened by a pavement roller on New York City’s Avenue of the Americas, Oct. 21, 1992. The recordings, donated by unhappy record fans, were collected by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, which planned to deliver the crushed remains to the singer. In 1992, O’Connor destroyed a photo of Pope John Paul II on U.S. national television. The pushback was swift, turning the late Irish singer-songwriter’s protest of sex abuse in the Catholic Church into a career-altering flashpoint.
BY HOLLY MEYER
July 27, 2023
In 1992, Sinéad O’Connor destroyed a photo of Pope John Paul II on U.S. national television. The pushback was swift, turning the late Irish singer-songwriter’s protest of sex abuse in the Catholic Church into a career-altering flashpoint.
More than 30 years later, her “Saturday Night Live” performance and its stark collision of popular culture and religious statement is remembered by some as an offensive act of desecration. But for others — including survivors of clergy sex abuse — O’Connor’s protest was prophetic, forecasting the global denomination’s public reckoning that was, at that point, yet to come. O’Connor, 56, died Wednesday.
The SNL moment stunned David Clohessy, a key early member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. In his 30s at the time, he had only recently recalled the repressed memories of the abuse he suffered. He found O’Connor’s act deeply moving. It was something he and other survivors never thought possible.
That night O’Connor, head shaved and looking straight into the camera, stood alone singing Bob Marley’s song “War” a capella. She finished the final lines, “We know we will win/ We have confidence in the victory/of good over evil,” and then moved an off-screen photo of Pope John Paul II in front of the camera.
Then O’Connor ripped it to pieces. She called out, “Fight the real enemy,” before she threw the scraps to the ground. Clohessy remembers it well.
RELATED COVERAGE
Sinéad O’Connor, gifted and provocative Irish singer-songwriter, dies at 56
“We were all just deeply convinced that we would go to our graves without ever seeing any public acknowledgment of the horror and without any kind of validation whatsoever,” Clohessy said. “That’s what made her words so very powerful.”
THE RIPPLES IT CAUSED
Reaction at the time was fierce from many corners. Later that month she was booed at an all-star tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden. One group destroyed more than 200 of her albums, cassettes and CDs with a steamroller lumbering down New York’s Sixth Avenue.
The SNL performance also appalled Thomas Plante, a Catholic psychology professor at California’s Santa Clara University, and his wife who is Jewish. Plante was well aware of the issue since he was researching, evaluating and treating clerical sex offenders at the time.
“It is understandable that people would want to make strong statements about their issues with the Catholic Church, but tearing up a picture of the Pope on live TV was way over the top,” Plante said in an email. “Many people feel free to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ when it comes to criticism of the Catholic Church.”
He also noted the prevalence of anti-Catholic hate, especially following the Boston Globe’s 2002 report revealing widespread abuse and cover-up by the church. Plante said the clergy abuse crisis was horrible, but people often fail to recognize that it is a problem of the 20th century and earlier — cases are extremely rare in this century, he said.
“Much progress has been made and current policies and procedures are actually working,” he said.
The quarter-century legacy of John Paul II — then pope, now a saint — has been badly tarnished by evidence he turned a blind eye to abuse even when the Vatican had copiously well-documented cases and even when bishops in the U.S., facing mounting legal liability, begged the Vatican for fast-track ways to defrock abusers in the 1980s.
Vatican officials have long excused John Paul’s attitude by arguing that he had seen first-hand how priests in his native Poland were intentionally discredited with false accusations by Communist authorities, and thus believed any accusations against clerics were mere “calumnies” intended to harm the church.
O’Connor was found unresponsive Wednesday at her home in southeast London. Saddened by her passing, Brenna Moore, a theology professor at Fordham University in New York and a big fan of O’Connor, described her as “a kind of prophetic truth-teller.”
Society, especially in the English-speaking world, is used to men taking on this role, Moore said, but when a woman does it, she’s accused of being crazy and angry. Moore, referencing O’Connor’s memoir, said the singer was more than a rebel with a shaved head.
“She sort of stands in a long line of artists and poets who have a kind of rebellious punk ability to speak truth to power in a very performative way,” Moore said. “She was a profoundly spiritual person, a profound seeker of transcendence and the truth.”
FOR SOME, THE ACT WAS COURAGEOUS AND EVEN WISE
Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, was a teen living on Long Island with her traditional Catholic Italian family in 1992; she recalled just how horrified they were by O’Connor’s protest. But for Manson, who was feeling a call to the priesthood at the time, looked at it more with curiosity.
Manson called O’Connor a visionary, especially given that neither the Irish or U.S. Catholic hierarchy had yet publicly reckoned with the pervasiveness of clergy sex abuse.
“Not many people that we would call prophetic are willing to risk everything, and she was. … And she lost almost everything as a result,” Manson said. “It is very, very scary to challenge the church in a very public way. And it takes enormous bravery and a willingness to be able to let go of everything.”
Clohessy also depicted the 1992 protest as courageous: “I think young people can’t know — and older people to some extent have forgotten — just how extraordinarily powerful the Catholic hierarchy was in those days.”
Invoking the famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote, Clohessy said that “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. She’s proof of that. And it bends so slowly — and it bends backwards along the way.”
Attorney Jeff Anderson, who has represented victims of Catholic clergy sex abuse in numerous cases across the U.S., connected with O’Connor around the time of her SNL appearance. In a statement, Anderson called her wise and ahead of her time.
“Sinéad saw predator priests not as a ‘couple bad apples’ but as signs and proof of a deeply corrupt and almost untouchable clerical system,” Anderson said. “It took tremendous courage for her to be one of those early, lonely voices for the voiceless.”
Michael McDonnell, interim executive director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said O’Connor “wore the anguish of victims of clergy abuse and it seems as though she knew in 1992 the horrors that hadn’t yet been revealed.
“Ultimately,” he said, “she relieved the pain for tens of thousands of victims with rebellion.”
___
Associated Press correspondent Nicole Winfield contributed from Rome. AP religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. Follow AP’s Holly Meyer at http://twitter.com/HollyAMeyer
Sinéad O’Connor, Who Told the Truth about the Catholic Church, Walks On
- BY NEELY BARDWELL
Sinéad O’Connor, Irish singer-songwriter who was known for her iconic shaved head and outspokenness both on and off-stage, died on Wednesday, July 26, at age 56.
Born in Dublin on December 8, 1966, to parents John, an engineer, and mother, Johanna, a dressmaker, her biggest hit was a rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” but what she was most known for was her appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1992. On the show, she ended an acapella performance of Bob Marley’s “War” by ripping a photo of Pope John Paul II into pieces as a stance against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. “Fight the real enemy,” she said.
Sexual abuse committed by clergy of the Catholic Church was pervasive for centuries against children around the world, including in Ireland. Native American children sent to Indian Boarding Schools that were operated by Catholic Churches suffered as well, separated from their families and tribes.
After tearing up the photo during the live performance, she was met with widespread criticism that resulted in her being booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. NBC had to apologize (and never invited her back), and her album “Am I Not Your Girl?” only made it to No. 27 on the charts. Her next album “Universal Mother,” released in 1994, never broke from No. 36 on the charts.
The act of tearing up the Pope’s image was considered extremely controversial at the time, and many thought her career was over.
“I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,” O’Connor told the New York Times in an interview in 2021. “But it was very traumatising. It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”
In 2021 she published a memoir, Rememberings, detailing her troubled childhood, her experience with the music industry, and her struggles with mental health. Earlier this year, she received the inaugural award for Classic Irish Album at the RTÉ Choice Music Prize awards, established to highlight Irish music of excellence. She dedicated it to Ireland’s refugee community. “You’re very welcome in Ireland,” she said. “I love you very much and I wish you happiness.”
Prior to the singer’s death, Belfast filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson had been working on a documentary film about O’Connor titled “Nothing Compares,” which is set to be released this Saturday.
Native people and the Irish have long been allies. During Ireland’s Great Famine, the Choctaws collected $170—the equivalent of $4,400 in today’s dollars—and sent it across the Atlantic Ocean to help feed the starving people in Ireland.
No comments:
Post a Comment