SINÉAD O’CONNOR FOLLOWED JESUS TO THE CROSS
The Saint Who Cried Out for the Victims of Abuse when No One Else Would
Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor died today. For a time she was one of the voices of my generation. “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a cover of a The Family song which she released in 1990, is one of those songs, the quiet kind that well up inside you like a heartbreak that hasn’t healed and never will. And yet somehow rather than battering the grief she shared with us was consoling. It told us that we weren’t alone.
But O’Connor was capable of battering her fans with grief as well. On October 3rd, 1992 on Saturday Night Life she ended an entirely a capella cover of Bob Marley’s song “War” with the lyrics “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil,” while holding up a picture of Pope John Paul II and tearing it to pieces. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, to an entirely silent crowd.
Everyone of a certain age remembers that moment. It was on every news program the next day, and for many thereafter. The next week on SNL host Joe Pesci held up the same picture during his monologue, now retaped together, and said, “She was very lucky it wasn’t my show. ‘Cause if it was my show, I would have given her such a smack.” The crowd cheered at this. (I would post the link, but honestly, fuck that guy.)
The thing is, Pesci’s response reflected the world’s. Radio stations bulldozed her records. She was booed at concerts and ridiculed for decades. She told the New York Times in 2021, “It was very traumatizing. It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”
In part no one really understood why she had done what she did. It seemed completely out of the blue. In fact she had changed parts of Marley’s song to include child sex abuse as one of the injustices in our world as a result of which “everything is war.”
Until the ignoble and unhappy regime
which holds all of us through child abuse, YEAH
Child abuse, YEAH,
Subhuman bondage,
Has been toppled, utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war.
But even that verse was terribly vague. And the entire performance was so eerie, I don’t think most people caught it, either then or later. All anyone saw was an Irish Catholic woman tearing up a picture of the Pope.
Later that month O’Connor did an interview with Rolling Stone in which the interviewer Alan Light says, “It seems you’ve gotten more focused on religion.”
Here’s her response:
“There’s no such thing as religion, there’s only God. Which is truth. Organized religion is a lie. It’s designed to take you away from God, particularly the Christian church. People must learn about the history of the popes, the people who are running the world. ‘Cause whether we like it or not, whether we practice Christianity or Catholicism or not, we’ve got to realize that those fuckers are running the world, they’re running every government in the world. They are the World Bank. I don’t have proof of that, but I know that it’s true.
We’re living in hell as far as I’m concerned. The existence of child abuse means that the devil is winning. The devil to me is not a little red guy with a fork, he’s a guy with a collar and a big red hat on that goes round saying, ‘Young people of Ireland, I love you,’ when the young people of Ireland are sitting on the streets on heroin.”
To which Light said: “Your spirituality sounds almost obsessive.” Clearly, missing the abuse piece of this and quietly serving up the “crazy bitch” spin instead.
And look, you might say the running-the-world-governments and World Bank stuff sounds pretty out there. But as the Boston Globe and others would show later, part of what allowed child sex abuse to go on was people in government (often Catholics) refusing to investigate it. In fact that’s exactly what led O’Connor to make the move in the first place. In a documentary on Showtime last year, she explained, “I had come across an article about families who had been trying to lodge complaints against the church for sexual abuse, and they were being silenced. Basically everything I had been raised to believe was a lie.”
The truth is, O’Connor was ten years too early. Americans were not clued into the violence that was being done to their children and children throughout the world by Catholic priests and brothers, let alone able to consider the idea that the Pope of the Catholic Church might somehow be involved. Even today, few Catholics seem willing to confront the possibility that the abuse crisis involves lies, cover ups or just horrific mismanagement from as high up as the popes, no matter what information is presented.
Nor do most people want to face the idea that that problem is so systemic it touches every good priest and brother that they know, too. In the church as in the police force, over and over you hear kind people who love their priests talk about “a few bad apples.” In my 31 years of experience and relationships with so many great priests and brothers, that is just not accurate. Even in a religious community with a better record on these kinds of issues like the Jesuits, there’s a warp in the wood that leans toward secrecy, self-protection and also to some extent self-deception.
I was horrified to read last month about Fr. Dan Kenney, S.J., a Jesuit from Omaha who apparently committed tremendous acts of violence toward children. Early in my training I’d see Dan at our province gatherings carrying on with this monkey puppet that he always had with him. Was it weird? Umm, yes. Yes it was.
But everyone would just laugh and say, “Oh, that’s just Dan.” He was literally called “The Monkey Priest.” I want to show you a picture, but honestly, See: Pesci.
There is no doubt that some Jesuits knew that this man was doing terrible things. But the Group Think, which Kenney very clearly promoted, guided us away from asking those questions, not looking at what was clearly super strange.
The bizarre situation of Jesuit artist Marko Rupnik in Rome looks to be another sad example of the “needs” of the institution undermining the integrity of those within it.
In 1992 few were ready to look at any of this. O’Connor was no fool; she had to know that. But still she stuck her neck out, for those families and also for her own. (In an interview in 2017, O’Connor described the horrifying acts of violence done to her by her mother, a faithful Catholic who had on the wall in her bedroom just that photo of John Paul II. “She ran a torture chamber.”)
And she got well and truly crucified for it.
If you have a chance, take a minute to watch O’Connor’s performance from SNL that night. Most of it is atonal chant, almost Gregorian, and can come off preachy. But every time she sings of war or children, the song opens up into a keening grief which reverberates.
As in “Nothing Compares 2 U,” O’Connor was trying to reassure people who were absolutely broken, those families who were desperately trying to get the church and the police to do something, that they were heard and seen. They were not alone.
She was also trying to sound the alarm on what is a global catastrophe. But we couldn’t let ourselves see.
If you or anyone you know is a survivor of sexual abuse or assault, , the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network offers both online chat and the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673. They also offer many ways you can help, from financially supporting their work to honoring someone.
In 2020 O’Connor sang “Nothing Compares 2 U” publicly for the last time. And it lands very different now. The grief is thicker, the pain sharper.
But even though it feels like we’re the ones she’s singing about now, the ones who brought her this pain, somehow she still finds it within her to allow us to share in that moment with her. It’s an incredible act of generosity.
May she rest now, finally, in peace.
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I’ll be back Sunday with Pop Culture Spirit Wow.