Controversy on a "Saturday Night"

On October 3^rd, 1992, I was gathered in the Long Island home of one of my 9^th grade classmates at Sacred Heart Academy for a sleepover party. We were all excited to watch Sinead O’Connor perform as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, as we had recently become enamored of her remake of the song “Nothing Compares 2 U”. As we settled around the television, Sinead O’Connor began to sing an a capella version of the Bob Marley song “War”. Slightly disappointed, as we had assumed she would perform her hit remake, we nonetheless watched intently. Suddenly, O’Connor took a photograph, seemingly out of thin air, of Pope John Paul II and, as she sang the lyric “evil”, tore the picture into pieces and threw them at the video camera, saying, “fight the real enemy”. Though we had no knowledge at the time, O’Connor was using this gesture to protest child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, and had apparently decided Saturday Night Live was the perfect forum.

As we watched aghast, my friend’s mother, who had been watching with us, leapt her seat on the couch and turned the television off, disgusted, as we were, by what we considered a display of utter disrespect to the Pope and to Catholics everywhere. As a Catholic thirteen year old girl attending a traditional Catholic high school, I knew I had witnessed something that I shouldn’t have. For the next week at school, I was inundated with the notion that Sinead O’Connor was “evil”, not my beloved Pope, from parents, teachers, and especially the nuns that ran our school.

It didn’t stop there; the backlash was everywhere I looked. The nightly news, the newspapers, the radio, it was apparent everyone had an opinion, many of these media outlets criticizing O’Connor’s behavior and some outright chastising her. My mother diligently subscribed to the Long Island Catholic, a newspaper, and passed onto me their harsh condemnation of O’Connor. The people of the United States voiced their collective opinions on the matter twelve days later when O’Connor appeared at Madison Square Garden to perform at Bob Dylan’s 30^th anniversary celebration concert, when a mix of cheers and many angry boos caused O’Connor to storm offstage in tears, an event covered by several news media.

As a naïve young teenager I believed, with certainty, that these newspapers, news programs, and even newscasters were omniscient, and if they said that Sinead O’Connor deserved the criticism, it must be so. Many years later, as the child abuse and sexual abuse scandals O’Connor referred to continue to rock the Catholic Church, and as I cringe at the cover-ups by higher-ups in my religion, I still cannot condone her actions. While as an adult I can perhaps see the allure of shock value, I disagree that desecrating a photo of the head of the Catholic Church is anything but disrespectful.

I have learned since that sleepover in the fall of 1992 to take every news story with the proverbial grain of salt, and if I saw Sinead O’Connor rip up that picture today, my opinion of her actions would be the same as it was then, but I hope it would be less influenced by the media.