The change in Irish culture was a long time coming. Sinéad O’Connor reflected it more than she initiated it.
In light of her death at age 56 there’s been lots of commentary about Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous appearance on Saturday Night Live in which she ripped up a picture of John Paul II. People have dug up the following week’s clip where host Joe Pesci had the picture taped back together and said he would have “given her such a smack” and pulled her by her “uh . . . eyebrows” to an uproar of laughter and applause. The New York Times characterizes it this way:
In an era where late-night television performances could still prompt monocultural mood shifts, her gesture was a volcanic eruption. She became a target instantly — of the religious right, of other celebrities, and, as she reported many years later in her memoir, of a couple of egg-tossing young men, as she exited the studio that same night.[emphasis mine]
Worse, in Esquire, Dave Holmes writes about how we all knew Sinéad was right, even then. Then he makes her a symbol for Ireland’s shaking of “theocracy.”
Ireland on the day of Sinéad’s death is vastly different from the country she was born into. Abortion is legal, and gay marriage is the law of a land where homosexuality was illegal until 1993. A once-repressive country has become one of the world’s most progressive. “There is no Ireland moving away from the Church as we have without Sinéad,” says Flynn.
None of this quite captures the truth. It’s a neatened-up history for a polarized age. Holmes’s portrait ends up turning O’Connor into a plastic saint of secularism, rather than the complicated, moralizing, and deeply troubled person she was.
It’s preposterous to cast the offended party as if it were just the religious Right. Weeks after the SNL performance, Sinéad O’Connor was lustily booed at Madison Square Garden at a tribute to Bob Dylan. This is not a Bible Belt audience. Neither were the SNL audiences that fell silent at the protest, or cheered Pesci a week later.
In fact, one of the only ways of understanding how far in esteem the Catholic Church has fallen in America is playing that Joe Pesci clip today. Respectable liberal opinion, even then, would sometimes rise to defend the Church, at least in qualified terms.
I remember my own mother’s complicated reaction. She loved Sinéad O’Connor’s music and had fallen away from practicing the faith in any serious way. But the gesture was genuinely scandalous. People of all faiths and none felt it was disrespectful of the faith of Catholics and therefore in some way threatening to America’s idea of pluralist social peace. In fact, people found it not just distasteful, but literally incomprehensible. They did not know what she meant by connecting child abuse to the image of the pope. Saturday Night Live‘s repudiation of O’Connor was not just because she sprung this surprise on them, but because it felt urgently that it needed to make amends with its audience.
Pace Holmes, very few American Catholics had any idea of the extent of the abuse crisis in the Church at this time. It would take over a decade for it to come out. Many took O’Connor’s gesture as a publicity stunt, like a mistimed provocation in the line of Madonna’s use of Catholic imagery.
In fact, the gesture was far better understood in “theocratic” Ireland than in the pluralist and secular United States. And her career continued in Ireland and in the U.K. in a way it didn’t in the United States. Ireland had been on a road of secularization for decades when her career took off. Holmes evokes the theocratic Ireland of the 1960s. But in the 1950s, Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh could write satires of the rote anti-clerical and anti-Catholic positions of the Irish press, such as “House Party to Celebrate the Destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland,” which described a party to celebrate a book party, in which a husband thrills to the clichéd praise of his wife’s book denouncing the Church.
With fighting admiration in his eyes
He could not see his wife but only Her.
He stammered: ‘You did more than satirise.
Great artist! The Irish Voltaire.’The reviews were coming in by every post,
Warm and fulsome – Seamus read extracts:
‘The Roman Catholic Hierarchy must
Be purple now with rage. She states the facts . . .’
The change in Irish culture was a long time coming. Sinéad O’Connor reflected it more than she initiated it. The penetration of the Church throughout Irish culture and consciousness means that for many people, all the miseries of school life, of being an awkward teenager, or the judgment of people around you, can be easily conflated with and blamed on the Church itself. This is what gives Irish anti-clericalism a zeal that few Americans can comprehend.
In 1992 the New York Times could be less partisan on her behalf. Jon Pareles wrote, “Tearing up the Pope’s photograph may have been the best way she could envision to condemn Catholicism, but she surely would have thought twice about tearing up a photograph of Louis Farrakhan or the Lubavitcher Rebbe.”
The incomprehensibility of tearing up the pope’s picture on live television prompted O’Connor to write an open letter explaining herself. Her letter, invoking “the history of my people” engaged in a rhetorical style that now strikes readers as cloyingly Irish “MOPE”y. As in “Most Oppressed People Ever.” But instead of the English, it was the Church.
The Catholic church has controlled us by controlling education, through their teachings on sexuality, marriage, birth control and abortion, and most spectacularly through the lies they taught us with their history books.
It concluded: “My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Again, to American ears, this seemed hyperbolic. Admitting that the Church can be a source of good was part of a larger social contract in American pluralism.
O’Connor was a brilliant singer, and genuinely talented. She was complex, too. A few years after the SNL controversy, she appeared on a late-night celebrity chat show in Ireland, and when prompted to sing, sang a hymn from her childhood.
To flatten her SNL appearance to fit a tidy 2023 culture-war narrative does an injustice to everyone. Although she disliked the hatred she received, O’Connor was genuinely willing to be unpopular in America, and not just with “the religious Right.” And she made herself that way.