How Sinéad O’Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on SNL and took on the world

On October 3, 1992, accompanied by a full orchestra, Sinéad O’Connor is about to present the first of two songs on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the USL; a fragile, nearly whispered version of Loretta Lynn’s “Success (Has Made a Failure of Our Home),” turned torch song on the singer’s tongue. The bold, shaven-headed punk girl will not disappoint; this Irish girl, she knows no shame, but she “do know Mandinka.” It’s not like she didn’t warn the suits of her insubordination straight out of the box.

\Success (Has Made a Failure of Our Home)’ is buoyed by a full orchestra, creating dramatic interstitial swells and breaks between verses and refrains. The orchestra dips to a soft bed of strings as Sinéad lays down the first tender words and notes. She may be singing the story of her own rise to fame and the mess it’s made of her personal life. (Her first marriage to John Reynolds, who’ll remain her lifelong best friend, writing collaborator, and producer, had dissolved a year earlier in 1991.)

Her graceful neck and collarbone glow nearly translucent, hands fidget shyly, eyes flutter down and back to us with a delicate sadness. The story flows from her eyes as much as from her mouth. A break in the tenderness, a silent pause, then with two smacks of a drum, the orchestra breaks into a sharp swell worthy of a Leonard Bernstein crescendo. Sinéad improvises, the words taking over her body: “I’ve never changed! I’m still the same!” The desperation, naked now in true punk glory as her voice breaks into an angry keening, “Am I not your girl?” repeating to an abrupt stop. Anyone who has caught their heart at the most formidable performances by Piaf, Garland, and Callas will never doubt they’ve witnessed something near miraculous. The performance is merely a prelude.

When we return to the concluding moments of SNL, Sinéad returns to a darkened stage and approaches the microphone. The orchestra is gone; she’s alone now. Her striking posture is framed by chiaroscuro light. Near her, nine white pillar candles burn, invoking an atmosphere of ritual. Nine, the number of completion. A Star of David, also a Rasta symbol of the Lion of Judah, now stands out against the pale skin of her neck. Tied to the mic stand is a red, green, and gold Rastafarian prayer scarf. Head shaven, gaze solemn and grave, she wears the same long white lace dress from the previous song, a dress indistinguishable from a wedding gown. Unbeknownst to the production staff, to everyone but herself, Sinéad is about to commit hari-kari in the eyes of the world. She’ll ignore the rehearsal script in an act that will cement her lifelong vocation as a social justice activist. It is an act of revelation that will backfire spectacularly.

She begins to sing/speak the emphatic words of Bob Marley’s song ‘War.’ The camera slowly creeps into close-up as she continues, eyes locked on the lens— “…the unhappy regime which holds all of us through child abuse, yeah, subhuman bondage . . . Children! Children! Fight! We have confidence in the victory of good over…” and on the concluding word “evil,” she holds up a photograph of Pope John Paul II in front of her face and rips it to pieces. As she throws the fragments toward the camera, she commands us to “Fight the real enemy!” Silence—except for one brave soul in the audience who lets out a timid “bravo!.” She removes her earbuds, blows out the candles, and leaves the stage.

Sinéad had slipped the pin off the grenade, shattering the mirage of celebrity for the sake of thousands of children physically, sexually, and psychologically abused by the Roman Catholic Church. We stared into her defiant eyes as she dared the world to see the truth. And the world wasn’t ready.

The news drip in Ireland began four years after Sinéad’s SNL moment in 1996, with abuse survivor Christine Buckley being the first to speak out on RTÈ Radio about the intense physical abuse she suffered in an orphanage at the hands of the Sisters of Mercy, sparking a cavalcade of women and men sharing their stories of institutional abuse. Ireland’s Prime Minister Bertie Ahern made a public apology to the survivors in 1999, with a promise of reparations, many of which never came, with some monies being withdrawn. Very few of the perpetrators were convicted. And the weight of these crimes in the press, committed under cover of the church in Ireland, always shifted predominantly to the nuns in the laundries and baby homes, as opposed to the priests.

In early 2002, The Boston Globe published its first reports of sexual abuse of children in the US Catholic Church by priests. And in 2012 a local historian in County Galway, Ireland, discovered the death certificates of 796 babies and toddlers at St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home. The tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of severe abuse victims across decades and centuries are an indelible scourge on the Catholic Church. Commissions of inquiry, truth commissions, and trials continue in the quest for justice. On SNL Sinéad O’Connor’s spoke to this truth truth—a moment she paid too dearly for.

At just twenty-four years old, Sinéad O’Connor ascended to the top of the pop charts with “Nothing Compares to You.” Her rendition of the originally composed song by Prince. There is no mimicry coming from Sinéad in her presentation of the song. The pathos, the rage, and the longing in her voice are pure duende.

As a result, envy was common with Sinéad; journalists, mostly male, as well as major and minor celebrities without an iota of her talent, were abusive to the point of absurdity. By the time Sinéad had hit Number 1 on the charts, she had already courted controversy with her radical truths and stark, exquisite image as the first female rock star sporting the ineffable eyes of an angel and a defiantly shaved head. Exposed she was, and unafraid to be. Yet Sinéad’s greatest strength remained her miraculous voice. That divine instrument, forged in the fires of child abuse, trauma, and a lifelong quest for mercy, was both sword and shield.

By the time of the SNL performance, she had already experienced the highs and lows of fame. She’d ignited controversy for her brazen attitude and for being the first bald female pop singer to have reached the Valhalla of rock.

Her portrait graced the cover of Rolling Stone in June of that year. A mere two months later, her music was taken off the air in a US radio boycott after she refused to have the Star-Spangled Banner played before her show in New Jersey. This sent Ol’ Blue Eyes Frank Sinatra’s knickers into a twist, with him announcing how he’d “like to kick her in the ass!” Quoted in Esquire magazine in 1991, she responded: “I can’t hit this man back, he’s like 78 years of age and I’d probably kill him.” Sinéad stood firm against the blowback, refusing to bow to the strictures of fame and the gendered expectations and demands imposed on female singers. She often recalled the criticism coming from men in the music biz, saying she should just “shut up and sing.” “Pinch your lips together.

How do you sing if you can’t open your mouth?” She never stopped singing and speaking truths to the public, using her celebrity as a platform to call out injustice, proving that she was a force to be reckoned with and was willing to sacrifice celebrity on the altar of truth. She repeatedly spoke about not wanting rock stardom and decided to turn her platform into a soapbox, firing spiritual, revolutionary napalm.

In Tarot, the Tower card represents radical change in its most graphic moment of destruction. The Tower can symbolize aspirations built on unsound foundations. The collapse of the Tower via a lightning bolt is akin to Shiva’s dancing foot slamming down to destroy, clearing away so that the opposite foot may rise in the dance of creation.(To create anew in 1999, she’d be ordained as a priest at Lourdes, in an effort to bring a message of love and restore her own faith in the church.)

Sinéad’s SNL act was her Tower moment. She blew up the mirage of stardom, and she did it righteously. Behind that torn curtain of a photo stood a cabal of priests and nuns called to be guardians of a child’s innocence, supposed messengers of God’s love now exposed as child abusers.

Two weeks later at a tribute concert for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden, Sinéad was meant to sing Dylan’s ‘I Believe in You,’ a deeply reverent song. When she appeared onstage, the crowd of 20,000 plus went ballistic, waves of roaring boos drowning out the cheers. The shock provoked her to launch into a repeat of the Marley song from SNL, with a strong punch on the words “child abuse.” The only person who came to her aid in that moment was Kris Kristofferson. Concert management asked Kristofferson to get her off the stage, but he wasn’t having it. Instead, he approached her onstage with a warm embrace, telling her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Kristofferson continues to praise her courage.

After these back-to-back public spectacles, a bloodlust of vilification ensued. Across the street from her record label’s office in Rockefeller Center, protestors drove a 30- ton steamroller over her cassettes, CDs, and LPs on national television. NBC, SNL’s master, banned her from ever performing again on the network. Death threats rained in on Sinéad and her team; celebrities and politicians issued public takedowns. On SNL, Joe Pesci weaved Sinéad-bashing throughout his opening monologue, ending with, “I would have gave her such a smack.” I watched an early screening of Nothing Compares, the documentary about Sinéad from Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson, and the most outrageously grotesque insult came from a woman—Camille Paglia—a so-called feminist and social critic trending at the time: “In the case of Sinéad O’Connor, child abuse was justified.” Although Sinéad never boasted about it, justification was righteously hers when the scandal first broke in 2002, fittingly, on the Catholic calendar’s Feast of the Epiphany. The Boston Globe began publishing a series of reports that the Catholic Church in the United States had been covering up child abuse by priests for decades. The hits kept coming.

In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI issued a public apology to the victims of sexual abuse throughout the decades (and most likely, the centuries) by Catholic priests in Ireland. At the time, did anyone write about how Sinéad O’Connor had been vilified for publicly calling out the abuse eighteen years previous? Did anyone shout praises for her bravery? Her prescience? The appearance of her blowing up her career also cast a glaring light on the hypocrisy of celebrity, of those petrified to speak to social justice causes for fear of losing fans, wealth, and status. She’d gain back her strength, but for two years after, she couldn’t escape death by a thousand cuts. The media was brutal to her. As she predicted on her sophomore record, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, “These are dangerous days. To say what you feel is to make your own grave.” Sinéad O’Connor was among the first to face the guillotine of cancel culture, and in spectacular fashion. Despite all the public abuse, being ridiculed and labeled as crazy (the usual cliché slapped on outspoken women of courage), she had no regrets.

She took the blows, suffered for it, and survived. She was living in America at the time, and her family in Ireland were terrified for her. The public vitriol was so overwhelming that they feared she’d be shot, assassinated.

She moved back to Dublin to recharge, went to a healer for a rebirthing session, and painted the rebirth as a beautiful image for the cover of what would be her next LP, Universal Mother. (Her original artwork is “lost,” probably in the custody of a 1980s art department employee or executive of Chrysalis Records NYC.) She kept her loved ones close and began studying bel canto, a style of operatic singing.

Two years after the SNL and Madison Square Garden events, she re-emerged with a soul-baring, healing work called Universal Mother. No public persecution could sway her from remaining true to herself, nor find her surrendering to the world’s hypocrisy.

This is an edited extract from Adele Bertei’s 33/13 book on Sinéad O’Connor’s Universal Mother (Bloomsbury).