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.
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. The quarter-century legacy of Pope John Paul II 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.
56-year-old O'Connor was declared dead after being found unresponsive yesterday 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."
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. 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.”
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.”
Shunned by America after her SNL appearance, O'Connor continued to release music and tour. Her concerts were always packed. As a new generation discovered her artistry and power, something changed. Among her 21st century crowds there was a new energy, a joyous appreciation. Her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, reclaimed her narrative. She had won, because she had pursued an authentic life beyond the artifice of the music industry structures, and she wanted everyone to know that.
Kathryn Ferguson's documentary that came the following year, Nothing Compares, extrapolated on this narrative, closing with scenes of Irish protest and progress on marriage equality and abortion rights, demonstrating how it was O'Connor's worldview that would ultimately be followed. O'Connor had been right all along, and everyone knew it. Her resilience was a human manifestation of vindication. As Ireland became a more secular country, she was one of the leading voices for confronting the Catholic Church while maintaining a personal spirituality.
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