There’s a particularly famous moment from the life of the pop-punk icon Sinéad O’Connor, who died at age 56 on Wednesday. It occurred in 1992 on the set of Saturday Night Live, and it’s possibly the best reflection of how courageous or inflammatory—depending on your view—O’Connor could be.
Staring into the camera, having just performed Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor—her head shorn, wearing a conservative white dress—held up a photo of Pope John Paul II. And then she tore it to pieces, shouting “fight the real enemy!” She tossed the mess onto the ground.
The aftermath was brutal. The crowd at a Bob Dylan concert booed O’Connor. Frank Sinatra called her “one stupid broad.” She was banned from ever appearing on NBC again. Madonna—the same Madonna who sang “Like a Prayer”—spoke out against her. The public wanted blood, and the moment came to be cited as the reason O’Connor’s career as a pop star ended.
But in her memoir, Rememberings, published in 2021, O’Connor wrote that she had no regrets about that decision. “A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career,” she wrote. “That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.”
At the time of O’Connor’s protest, Pope John Paul II was profoundly popular, particularly in the U.S. In the past two decades, following a series of reports that started with the Boston Globe’s 2002 Spotlight investigation, Catholics would come to know Pope John Paul II’s role in the coverup of the sex abuse crisis. But back in 1992, he was still the pope that drew massive, adoring crowds of young people. After his death, he was made a saint
In the years following her SNL appearance, O’Connor kept a relatively low profile, appearing at smaller shows where, she wrote in her memoir, she was happy being “just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then.”
But something unbelievable happened to that angry, public moment that made so many people furious—it morphed. Today, when you ask many Roman Catholics what they think of one of the most infamous moments of modern pop-cultural protest against a pontiff, some have a very different perspective than the public narrative at the time.
“We need to ask: Everyone who wanted her to apologize back then—when were we going to apologize to her?” James T. Keane, a senior editor at the Jesuit magazine America, said in a phone call.
“Had the Catholic Church heeded Sinead O’Connor eleven years before the Spotlight revelations in Boston, taken her protest as an opportunity to face some hard truths, the church would be in a better position today,” a Chicago theologian, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote to me in a message.
“Sinead O’Connor was so ahead of her time,” said Brenna Moore, a theology professor at Fordham University. “Decades and decades ahead of her time.”
O’Connor had explained the protest as relating to sex abuse in the church, but at the time, “no one was saying, ‘well, maybe she has a point,’ ” Keane said. “And what we’ve learned over the past 30 years is that a lot of us were a little naïve about how deep the problem of sex abuse and physical abuse was.”
Today, there are undoubtedly those who would still react just as negatively to O’Connor’s stunt. Keane said that the church does not teach that popes are above reproof and that many people would criticize John Paul II today, “but at the same time, the unofficial line is how dare you say that about a saint.” Bill Donohue of the Catholic League led the public charge against O’Connor back in 1992; on Wednesday, he put out a statement trashing O’Connor as violent, stupid, and “certifiably crazy.”
Still, it’s not at all taboo for Catholics today to voice their love for O’Connor. Moore, at Fordham, self-identifies as a major O’Connor fan, and she argues that the popular narrative—of Sinéad O’Connor versus the Catholic Church—is all wrong.
To understand Sinéad O’Connor, Moore said in a phone interview, you cannot divorce her from Catholicism. Sure, O’Connor would go on to renounce her religious background, in various ways. She had herself ordained as a priest by an independent Catholic group not recognized by the church. She asked three different popes to excommunicate her. She converted to Islam. But her Catholic religious background undeniably formed her.
When she was a teenager in Ireland, O’Connor lived for a stint in a Magdalene laundry, severe and often abusive homes for “fallen women” in Ireland that were run by the church. An American audience wouldn’t have known about these homes, and the Irish didn’t discuss them. O’Connor later explained that the photo she tore up had hung in her abusive mother’s house throughout her childhood and that she associated it with child abuse.
So she had real reason to associate the church with personal pain. But according to Moore, her relationship with the church—or at least the faith it promulgated—was complex. “Yes, she ripped up the picture of the pope,” she said. “But she is totally incomprehensible outside of Catholicism.” Moore noted that O’Connor’s eighth album was named Theology, based on her reinterpretation of psalms. “It’s not lightweight,” she said. “She was a spiritual seeker in the deepest sense of the word.”
O’Connor once remarked that she grew up in a “theocracy,” in reference to Catholic Ireland. And this made sense for someone who chafed at spiritual limitations.
“There’s a long line of artists who feel a deep connection to something holy or sacred or transcendent,” Moore said. “And often the institutions that embody the sacred can be inadequate to those seekers.”
Moore, a theologian at a Catholic university, appreciates O’Connor’s rebelliousness, and the legacy it created. “Many of us, including practicing Catholics, feel that way when it comes to sex abuse crisis and the silence of the hierarchy,” she said. “And we look back at her actions. And it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so brave.’ ”
