BishopAccountability.org
	Sinead O’connor Calls for Catholic Boycott By Robert Mackey The New York Times March 31, 2010 http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/sinead-oconnor-calls-for-catholic-boycott/ [with video] Nearly two decades after the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live,” to protest what she said was the Vatican’s responsibility for child abuse, she has called on fellow Irish Catholics to boycott the church until Pope Benedict XVI makes “a full confession” and agrees to “a full criminal investigation” of the church’s role in concealing the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy. First in a statement on her Web site, then in an op-ed piece for The Washington Post and in interviews with The Los Angeles Times, the BBC and CNN, Ms. O’Connor rejected the pope’s pastoral letter to the Irish people as “an insult” and suggested that “the goodhearted, sweet Catholic people who go to Mass still despite all of this” could force the Vatican into giving a more complete account of its role by employing a tactic with Irish roots: a boycott. Here is Ms. O’Connor, who was abused as a child, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church had engaged in a cover up it has yet to fully admit, during an appearance on the BBC’s “Newsnight” on Tuesday: “I’m a Catholic, and I love God,” she told The L.A. Times. “That’s why I object to what these people are doing to the religion that I was born into.” She added that Catholics “have the power in their hands to get the Vatican on its knees and confess.” They can do this, she said, “by refusing to go to Mass, boycott them until they actually come to their knees and confess.” Speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN this week, Ms. O’Connor argued that church policies were the problem. She pointed out that the man who now leads the Catholic Church in Ireland personally swore to secrecy two children who were abused by a priest in the 1970s, and was, as he has said, following the rules at the time. She also denied that she was anti-Catholic but said she felt let down by the leaders of the church. Personally I would say I am a Catholic woman. I am proud to be a Catholic woman. I separate, sometimes, the difference between God and religion. I’m passionately in love with what I would call the Holy Spirit. I don’t believe it matters if you call it God, Buddha, Krishna, Jesus, Fred or Daisy. It’s the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t matter. But what I would like to see as a Catholic is actually Christian, honest people running the shop. In her essay for The Washington Post, Ms. O’Connor — who was briefly an ordained priest in the Latin Tridentine Church, a splinter group of Roman Catholicism — explained that when she tore up that image of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live,” in October 1992, “I knew my action would cause trouble, but I wanted to force a conversation where there was a need for one.” The many revelations of the sexual abuse of children by members of the Catholic Church that have come in the years after that gesture may have made the protest make more sense to Americans. But it was less baffling to observers in Ireland at the time. Niall Stokes, an Irish music journalist, told The Times in 2003 that when Ms. O’Connor tore up that photograph (which had been taken during the pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979), ”People respected that to a far greater extent here” than in the United States. So while Ms. O’Connor may still be viewed as a flake by many Americans, her suggestion that other Irish Catholics might also be losing faith not in their religion but in its leaders could contain the seeds of a real cause for concern at the Vatican.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.