Breda O’Brien: Sinéad O’Connor was a prophetic voice in the Old Testament sense

Since Sinéad O’Connor’s tragic death, attention has been focused again on the moment when she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992. According to her autobiography, Rememberings, the background was reading a brief article in an Irish newspaper hinting that children had been abused by priests. Their stories had not been believed by the police or the bishops to whom their parents reported the abuse.

Notice the language – hints and brief references. Although the media later did sterling work in revealing criminal abuse of children, initially it was timid and cautious.

The year 1992 was still two years before Fr Brendan Smyth was jailed in Northern Ireland for a horrendous trail of abuse. It was three before Andrew Madden would courageously go public about being abused by Fr Ivan Payne.

Sinéad O’Connor was a prophetic voice in the Old Testament sense, of calling out injustice and demanding change. She was speaking to a world largely in denial – just as we are ignoring stories of girls in State care being sexually abused in a systematic fashion right now. We will continue to do so today until some other prophet forces us to pay attention.

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Cardinal Bernard Law, the Boston prelate once named as only marginally less influential than the Kennedys in that city, was among those who condemned her. He was later revealed to have facilitated the movement of abusing priests from parish to parish without any care for those whose lives had been shattered.

It is hard to remember a world where ripping up a picture of the Pope caused universal outrage. Would there be the same outrage if say, Billie Eilish ripped up a picture of Pope Francis? Some believe that it was because she was a woman, and women are not meant to be brash and audacious.

[Pope John Paul] did oversee the reform of the Code of Canon Law, finally published in 1983, that listed sexual contact with a minor as one of the reasons why a priest can be permanently removed from the clerical state. It was rarely enforced

Perhaps a bigger factor was Pope John Paul’s high approval ratings in the United States, and indeed, worldwide. If Sinéad O’Connor was on her way to being a superstar, John Paul was already one in his own right.

As British historian Timothy Garton Ash, a self-described agnostic liberal, said: “I would argue the historical case in three steps: without the Polish pope, no Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980; without Solidarity, no dramatic change in Soviet policy towards Eastern Europe under Gorbachev; without that change, no velvet revolutions in 1989.”

Culpably negligent

Garton Ash says that John Paul II was also the consistent voice of the half of humankind who live on less than $2 a day. The historian characterised the late pontiff’s advocacy on that front as the “most impressive attempt so far made by any single human being to spell out what moral globalisation might mean, starting with a lived practice of universal sympathy.”

The tragedy is that the same pope was culpably negligent when it came to child abuse, possibly seeing the allegations through the lens of his life in Poland under a regime that repressed and spread misinformation about the Church. He did oversee the reform of the Code of Canon Law, finally published in 1983, that listed sexual contact with a minor as one of the reasons why a priest can be permanently removed from the clerical state. It was rarely enforced.

He visited the US seven times, although he visited Ireland before his first visit there. One visit was to Denver for World Youth Day, (WYD) 1993, an international gathering of young people first instituted by him in 1985.

The Catholic hierarchy worried whether young people would travel to Denver, which then had a surging crime rate, to see a septuagenarian pope. As it transpired, WYD was a huge success. More than 750,000 attended the final Mass in punishing heat.

For nearly 30 years, many faithful Catholics have been urging the Church to acknowledge fully the harm caused by sexual abuse

Pope Francis is currently in Lisbon at the first post-pandemic World Youth Day. The issue of child abuse still hangs over the Church. In February, an independent commission found at least 4,815 children had been abused by clergy in the Portuguese Catholic Church over the past 70 years. The usual caveat was issued that this may be an underestimation due to secrecy and poor records.

[ Sinéad O’Connor was quiet and loud. Brilliant and bashful. She oozed a kind of creative lava ]

[ Rememberings: A self-portrait of integrity, pain and punchlines ]

Pope Francis is using a wheelchair for this trip and he is not long after intestinal surgery. After a long, busy WYD opening day on Wednesday, he met victims of clerical sexual abuse. There has been real progress on child safeguarding in the Church, mostly due to an army of faithful lay volunteers and dogged and often frustrated campaigners such as our own Marie Collins. Nonetheless, for nearly 30 years, many faithful Catholics have been urging the Church to acknowledge fully the harm caused by sexual abuse. Rather than being dragged kicking and screaming, country by country, to acknowledge its sins and crimes, it should all have been acknowledged, admitted and revealed already.

It overshadows everything, including that this WYD is strongly promoting sustainability and this pope is a prophet regarding climate change.

It continues to be a blight, a counter-witness to the message of Jesus, whom Sinéad O’Connor, a troubled soul harried by serious mental health problems, continued to love until her premature and devastating death.