By HOLLY MEYER
In 1992, Sinéad O’Connor destroyed a photo of Pope John Paul II on U.S. national television. The pushback was swift, turning the late Irish singer-songwriter’s protest of sex abuse in the Catholic Church into a career-altering flashpoint.
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. O’Connor, 56, died Wednesday.
The SNL moment stunned David Clohessy, a key early member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. In his 30s at the time, he had only recently recalled the repressed memories of the abuse he suffered. He found O’Connor’s act deeply moving. It was something he and other survivors never thought possible.
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.
“We were all just deeply convinced that we would go to our graves without ever seeing any public acknowledgment of the horror and without any kind of validation whatsoever,” Clohessy said. “That’s what made her words so very powerful.”
Reaction at the time was fierce from many corners. Later that month she was booed at an all-star tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden. One group destroyed more than 200 of her albums, cassettes and CDs with a steamroller lumbering down New York’s Sixth…
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