UNITED STATES
The Week
[with video]
By Michael Brendan Dougherty
It was Oct. 3, 1992, when Sinead O’Connor sang a haunting a capella cover of Bob Marley’s “War” on Saturday Night Live, in which she replaced the word “racism” with “child abuse” and tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II while singing about the victory of good over evil. She finished her performance by shouting, “Fight the real enemy.” At the end of the clip you can practically feel the SNL audience lose its breath.
The freak-out was immediate and severe. O’Connor was pilloried tabloid to tabloid in perhaps the last collective utterance by ethnic outer-borough Catholic New York. The reaction was epitomized almost perfectly on the following week’s show, when Joe Pesci held up a taped-together picture of the Pope and said he “would have gave her such a smack” to vigorous applause.
As John Paul II’s canonization approaches, I can’t stop thinking about this event, these two people, and their subsequent history.
For the rest of the 1990s, Pope John Paul II was increasingly considered a holy man, made more saintly by his daring embrace of the suffering brought on by Parkinson’s disease. Devotion to him as “John Paul the Great” developed even as he lived.
Meanwhile, O’Connor’s career diminished. She was commonly assumed to be a silly weirdo. In a kind of religious left-right mash-up, she was ordained a “priest” in a breakaway Catholic sect founded by Latin Mass devotees. Rather charmingly, she embraced a vow of celibacy only to give that up after three months. “I tried,” she said, “No thanks.”
It took more than a decade before people came around to the fact that O’Connor may have been on to something. She no longer seems to have anything to do with breakaway Traditionalists, but she still occasionally performs in a Roman collar, still rocks an unbelievably expressive voice for pop music, and has an album due out soon. In a recent formal debate, she took the position that the Scriptural prophets, the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation show that the story of God is one of a divine enemy fighting against organized religion.
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