In 1992, Sinéad O’Connor was one of the most famous singers on the planet. Her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” went No. 1 around the world two years earlier, and you would be hard-pressed to find someone who hadn’t seen the iconic music video, with her shaved head and enormous eyes. Fierce and outspoken, she was unlike any stars I had ever seen.
I was home from college that weekend, sprawled on the couch in my parents’ living room, my mom and dad asleep down the hall. Like the good Catholics we were, we had a prominent portrait of Pope John Paul II hanging on our wall, which, you might recall, is a pretty important detail for what happened next.
O’Connor was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on October 3. For her closer, she performed a haunting rendition of Bob Marley’s “War” a cappella. The original lyrics were from a 1963 speech by Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, and O’Connor had modified them to address child abuse.
At the end, she held up a photograph, and in a split second, I recognized the face that featured so prominently on our wall. She tore it into pieces, told the camera to fight the real enemy, and tossed the scraps toward the lens.
No applause came, and the studio sat silent. If you were raised Catholic, you probably felt like me, like you were watching something you shouldn’t. Catholic from birth, confirmed at twelve, I had been taught that some things weren’t questioned. Here was someone doing just that. Later, O’Connor revealed that the photo belonged to her own mother.
We have the hindsight now to know she was protesting the Catholic Church’s handling of child abuse by clergy, which was not in the public dialogue at that point. It would take years for the full scope of the abuse to be revealed by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation in 2002.
The backlash was vicious, in an early iteration of “cancel culture. Thousands of complaints were sent to NBC. Public figures of every stripe condemned her, and a week later, Joe Pesci hosted the show and mocked her from the same stage. My own mother, who heard about it at Mass the next morning, called it disgraceful.
Two weeks after SNL, O’Connor walked onstage at Madison Square Garden for a Bob Dylan tribute concert. She was booed so loudly that her planned song couldn’t be performed. She stood there, took it, sang “War” again over the noise, and left the stage. Kris Kristofferson was there to comfort her.
Through the 2000s and beyond, as the scandal spread, O’Connor’s protest came to be seen by many as prophetic. After her passing in 2023, the clip resurfaced everywhere, and this time the comments were full of apologies. I don’t think of that night as a stunt anymore. I think of it as the moment someone told the truth before the rest of us were ready to hear it, and paid a horrible price.