In 1992, Sinead O’connor destroyed a picture of Pope John Paul II on US national television. The attack was swift, turning the late Irish singer and songwriter’s protest over sexual abuse in the Catholic Church into a career-changing point.
More than 30 years later, her” Saturday Night Live ” performance and her strong clash of popular culture and religious declaration 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, foreshadowing the public reckoning of the global denomination that was, at that point, still to come.
The moment shocked David Clohessy, a leading early member of the Survivors Network of those who were abused by priests. In his 30s at the time, he had only recently recalled repressed memories of the abuse he suffered. He found O’connor’s action deeply touching. It was something he and other survivors never thought possible.
That night, O’connor, with his head shaved and looking straight into the camera, stood alone singing Bob Marley’s song “Zimbar” a capella. She finished the last lines,” we know we will win/ we trust in the victory/of good over evil, ” and then moved an off-screen photo of Pope John Paul II to the camera.
O’connor broke it into pieces. She cried out,” fight the real enemy, ” before throwing the remains on the ground. Chloe remembers it well.
“We were all deeply convinced that we would go to our graves without ever seeing any public acknowledgment of the horror and without any kind of corroboration,” Clohessy said. “That’s what made her words so powerful.”
THE WAVES THAT CAUSED
The SNL performance horrified Thomas Plante, a professor of Catholic psychology at California’s Santa Clara University, and his wife who is Jewish. Plante was aware of the issue as 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 too over the top,” Plante said in an email. “Many people feel free to’ throw the child out with the bathwater ‘ when it comes to criticism of the Catholic Church.”
He also noted the spread of anti-Catholic hatred, especially after the Boston Globe report in 2002 that revealed widespread abuse and cover-up by the church. Plante said the crisis of clergy abuse was terrible, 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.
“A lot of progress has been made and the current policies and procedures are actually working,” he said.
O’connor, 56, died on Wednesday; she was found unresponsive at her home in southeast London. Saddened by her death, Brenna Moore, a theology professor at Fordham University in New York and a big fan of O’conner, described her as “a kind of prophetic truth-teller.”
In This October. 5, 2014, Irish singer Sinead O’connor performs during the Italian state television program RAI” che Tempo che Fa”, in Milan, Italy. (AP Photo / Antonio Calanni, File)
Society, especially in the English-speaking world, is used to men taking on this role, Moore said, but when a woman does it, she is accused of being mad and angry. Moore, referring to O’connor’s memoir, said the singer was more than a rebel with a shaved head.
“She 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 deeply spiritual person, a deep seeker of excess and truth.”
FOR SOME, THE ACT WAS BOLD AND EVEN WISE
Jamie Manson, President of Catholics for choice, was a teenager living on Long Island with her traditional Italian Catholic family in 1992; she recalled 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 him more curiously.
Manson called O’connor a visionary, especially given that neither the Irish or American Catholic hierarchy had yet publicly accounted for the prevalence of clergy sexual abuse.
“Not many people who we would call prophetic are willing to risk everything, and she was. And she lost almost everything as a result,” Manson said. “It’s very, very scary to challenge the church in a very public way. And it takes great bravery and willingness to be able to give up everything.”
Clohessy also described the 1992 protest as bold: “I think young people can’t know-and older people to some extent have forgotten-how immensely powerful the Catholic hierarchy was in those days.”
The famous quote by Martin Luther King Jr. Clohessy said, ” the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. She’s proof of that. And it bends so slowly-and bends backwards along the way.”
Attorney Jeff Anderson, who has represented victims of Catholic clergy sexual abuse on numerous occasions across the US, connected with O’connor around the time of her appearance on SNL. In a statement, Anderson called her wise and ahead of her time.
“Sinead viewed predatory priests not as a’ couple of bad apples, ‘ but as signs and evidence 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 the survivors of those Abused by priests Network, said O’conner “had worn on the anguish of clergy abuse victims and it seems as if she knew in 1992 the horrors that had not yet been revealed.
“Ultimately, “he said,” it eased the pain for tens of thousands of victims with rebellion.”
The quarter – century legacy of John Paul II-then the pope, now a saint-has been badly tarnished by evidence he turned a blind eye to abuse even when the Vatican had well-documented cases and even when bishops in the U.S.b. a. facing growing legal responsibilities, he pleaded with the Vatican for quick ways to exonerate abusers in the 1980s.
Vatican officials have long justified John Paul’s stance by arguing that he had seen first-hand how priests in his native Poland were deliberately discredited with false accusations by Communist authorities, and thus believed that any accusation against the clergy was merely “slander” intended to harm the church. It was against that background that Sinead O’connor’s protest on SNL took place-and in that context that is now remembered.
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Associated Press correspondent Nicolesibinfield contributed from Rome. AP’S coverage of religion receives support through AP’s collaboration with The Conversation us, with funding from Lilly Endobbment Inc. AP is solely responsible for this content. Follow Holly Meyer of AP in http://twitter.com/HollyAMeyer
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