Sinead O'Connor and the Catholic Church

I just read the news that the incredible Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor was found dead, after struggling with a lifetime of mental illness possibly caused by childhood abuse. She was only 56 years old.

In her honor, I offer you something that I wrote about her about a decade ago.

On an evening of October of 1992, in the eyes of most Catholics, Sinéad O’Connor turned overnight from the girl who sang beautiful love ballads such as “Nothing Compares 2 U” into the antichrist’s employee of the month. Sinéad had gone on Saturday Night Live, and performed a modified version of Bob Marley’s “War” which, in her rendition, discussed child abuse. To wrap the night, she pulled out a picture of the pope, and tore it up in front of the camera. “Fight the real enemy,” she told a stunned audience.

Sinéad clearly was not trying to win a popularity contest. Millions of Catholics probably regretted the good, old days when they could have dealt with her by barbecuing her at the stake. And even much of the non-Catholic world responded with equal moral indignation. The following day, cheering protesters crushed hundreds of her CDs with steamrollers outside of Rockefeller Center. Joe Pesci and Frank Sinatra vied with each other for who could proclaim louder their intention of beating her to a pulp. Just a couple of weeks later, she was booed off stage by the audience attending a Bob Dylan tribute! Her very promising career never fully recovered. Just about everyone looked at her as a nut case who didn’t know what she was talking about. Her allegation that the upper echelons of the Catholic Church had covered up for decades thousands of cases of child abuse—which was the reason for her gesture—was dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory created by a virulent anti-Catholic.

But as it turns out, she was neither crazy nor anti-Catholic. As later revelations made abundantly clear, Sinéad was right. Simply, she had dared to speak out about a horrific issue long before doing so would be popular.

In the following years, evidence began to emerge from every corner of the world. The dirty little secret Sinéad was talking about became impossible to ignore. In just about every continent, thousands of kids had been raped by Catholic priests. If the story stopped here, one could push the argument that maybe, just maybe, the Church was not responsible for the action of some awful individuals who just happened to don Catholic robes. But the actual rapes were only the first layer in this sickening tale. In case after case, when reports of the abuses climbed the ladder of the Catholic hierarchy, reaching the ears of those in leadership positions, the reaction was always the same: rather than reporting the rapists to the police, let’s just reassign them to a new location where they could continue their child-molesting activities without attracting too much attention. If some victims are too determined to give up, let’s just throw some money their way in exchange for their silence. But in all cases, let’s make sure that they don’t sue us thereby spoiling the good name of Catholicism. Time and time again, the Church’s response indicated a greater concern with protecting its image and reputation than with protecting kids. As Sinéad would argue, the fact that so many local churches took the exact same steps to cover up the tracks of the rapists among them was evidence that they were following the same directives from the very top of the Church.

The Church’s public relations department certainly botched their damage control operation. Instead of taking responsibility and trying to figure out concrete ways to prevent further abuses, the Church responded by blaming the media coverage that—according to them—had focused excessively on the issue. “Protestants rape kids too”—they screamed loudly—”but the big, bad media only focuses on the kids raped by us poor Catholics ...” Not exactly a sympathy-inducing argument. And just to add farce to tragedy, Catholic politicians like the former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum also blamed cultural relativism and sexual permissiveness for these events. The Church itself concluded that the 1960s’ liberal standards, feminism and a growing acceptance of homosexuality went hand in hand with a spike in priestly child abuse cases. The rapist priests—in other words—were just victims of the liberal culture that had caused people to question the Church and its sexual rules. Damned hippies... it was really all their fault.

Sinéad’s critics, despite all their smug self-righteousness, were eventually silenced by the mountains of evidence indicating she had been right all along. But clearly they forgot to apologize with the same loudness with which they had attacked her. Not only had they been wrong about her being crazy, but they were also wrong about their portrayal of her as an anti-Catholic zealot. What everybody forgot in the midst of all the confusion was that Sinéad was herself Catholic. To be sure, she disagreed with much of what the Catholic Church had done, but she also believed Catholicism should be rescued by the hands of those who had hijacked it, and should be restored to its rightful glory. This is why she decided to be ordained by a dissident Catholic group that had broken away from the Church. Her mission—she said—was nothing less than rescuing God from religion.

Precisely because she loved what Catholicism could be, she could not tolerate what Catholicism had become. In a 2010 open letter to the pope, Sinéad was as unrepentant as ever. Without missing a beat from her picture-tearing days, she flat out told the pope he was a liar for pretending to be shocked by the scandal, when he had penned a letter to all Catholic bishops in the world reminding them that anyone refusing to take an oath of silence on the matter should be excommunicated. Boycotting the Church—she continued—would be the only way to force it to take responsibility, so that real healing could begin.

Speaking of one of her favorite heroines, Joan of Arc, Sinéad once said, “How you get to be a saint is you speak out against the Church, they murder you, and then a century later they make you a saint.” So, maybe there is still time for a Saint Sinéad.

P.S. here’s a video of my daughter doing a cover of “Nothing Compares” (by Prince but made famous by Sinéad). If you like it, please consider subscribing to her YouTube channel.