Sinéad was right

Ten years after ripping up a photo of the pope to protest sexual abuse in the Catholic Church -- and destroying her career -- Siniad O'Connor returns to talk about her new album of Irish folk, her kids and why she sympathizes with America.

By Jake Tapper

Oct 12, 2002 | Roughly 10 years ago, Sinéad O'Connor, the shorn, angry, alt-rock balladeer, committed what seemed like career suicide. On "Saturday Night Live" the night of Oct. 3, 1992, O'Connor implored the audience to "fight the real enemy," whereupon she tore up a photograph of His Holiness Pope John Paul II.

I've come to talk to O'Connor today to discuss what almost no one seems to remember: She tore up that picture of the pope to protest pedophilia in the Catholic Church and the complicity of the church hierarchy.

Not that O'Connor didn't try to make that clear. By singing the Bob Marley song "War" -- and changing the line "fight racial injustice" to "fight sexual abuse" -- she thought she would be bringng the issue of child sexual abuse to the national consciousness. But however widespread they may have been back in Dublin, revelations that various Catholic dioceses were defending pedophile priests, and shuffling them from parish to parish, were eons away from the American consciousness.

So instead she set off a firestorm of anti-O'Connor protests. Stunned, "SNL" executives didn't know how to react as the switchboard lit up. Thousands of irate calls poured in. In the NBC control room, the director, Dave Wilson, purposely did not press the "applause" button. Less than two weeks later, O'Connor -- whose 1990 Grammy-nominated album "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got," with the hit single "Nothing Compares 2 U," was No. 1 in Billboard for eight weeks -- was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden.

Days later, she stormed back to Europe. "I'm not writing any more fucking songs and I'm not singing any more fucking songs," she said at the time.

"I was offended," said NBC spokesman Curt Block. "The executive producer, Lorne Michaels, likewise was offended and surprised." Outside Rockefeller Center, a crowd cheered while a 30-ton red and yellow steamroller crushed dozens of her tapes, CDs and LPs. The next week on "SNL," Joe Pesci said that what O'Connor did was "wrong," and he held up a retaped photo of the pope, drawing cheers.

Even Madonna didn't support O'Connor. "I think there's a better way to present her ideas rather than ripping up an image that means a lot to other people," Madonna told Irish radio. "You have to do more than denigrate a symbol."

But given the child sexual abuse scandal that a decade later engulfs the Catholic Church, one has to look back at the O'Connor scandal in a new light. Yes, shredding a photo of the pope was indubitably offensive, but was it more offensive than what the pope, ultimately, was responsible for supervising at the time: lechery-laden rectories, pedophile-shuffling church leaders? Intriguingly, it's O'Connor who has the most interesting perspective on it all, in that she seems not at all resentful about the way things went down.

"It's very understandable that the American people did not know what I was going on about," O'Connor says about the 1992 brouhaha. "But outside of America, people did really know and it was quite supported and I think very well understood."

She says she doesn't "necessarily feel I have a right to feel vindicated or not vindicated." If she had to pinpoint an emotion, she says, "I guess I feel sad for the American people that they have to suffer such a shock."

In an extensive interview, O'Connor expresses a variety of surprising opinions -- waxing understanding about the U.S. government's "war on terrorism" while remaining a pacifist, maternal if bemused about her son's questionable taste in music, and concerned about the health and treatment of the man whose photograph she so infamously tore up 10 years ago. She is sitting here with me in this midtown Manhattan hotel suite, looking rather earth mother-y, to promote her new album, "Sean-Nós Nua," a collection of Irish folk songs.

O'Connor, who is 35 and now has short black hair, is an intriguing combination of bold opinions and a disarmingly humble mien. She says that she had no idea that the pedophilia scandals that had been erupting in Ireland throughout the 1980s were also going down in the U.S.

"The scale on which it's happened in America is really awful," she says. Flabbergasted by the sheer number of American priests presently accused of molesting boys from their parishes, O'Connor says that the size of the scandal doesn't jibe with her sense of American justice. "You wouldn't think -- as a person outside of America -- that anyone could get away with this shit in America for so long," she says. "Nobody really gets away with anything. I saw a clamp on a car the other day -- it was a 'deadbeat dad' clamp. You get away with jack in this country."

Next Page: Tim Robbins was protesting GE, but Siniad had something bigger in mind

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