Something the newly ordained Sinead O'Connor said this week when asked for her reaction to the widespread view that she was several wafers short of a Mass, should go some way to easing the conscience of journalists (some of us have one, you know) who may for whatever reason not be entirely comfortable commenting on this rather bizarre situation.
She spoke down the phone, from the place she had "escaped" to from Lourdes, and said impatiently "place your index fingertip against the tip of your thumb. Do it now. Are you pressing them together?" As though humouring a small child one obeyed, the left hand holding the phone, the relevant digits of the other forming a clumsily shaped but clearly visible zero. Then that restless, middle-class Dublin voice again. "Look at it. Do you see it? That's how much I care about what anyone says about me anymore. Do you understand?" Imperfectly, Sinead.
She said a lot that day, on the phone from she-wouldn't-say-where and then later, expanding upon her points into an answering machine as though it were a listening ear. She had said a lot to Marian Finucane two days before. People who heard her proclamations live on radio that she was going to save the Catholic Church - ranting on "as though she were some kind of second coming", they would later remark to each other during their coffee break - smirked and muttered "God love her, what will she do next?" Others, like Pat Kenny were disturbed by the fact that her ordination had made the headlines on that mornings news. "I just feel sorry for her," he concluded. For him, at least, the subject of Mother Bernadette Mary O'Connor was closed. Perhaps that is the most appropriate reaction, indeed her family has kept a typically dignified silence. Unfortunately for anyone close to her and due in no small part to her own clever use of the media, this dramatic leap of faith is proving almost impossible to ignore. As one of our most talented, successful and prolific exports, Sinead the celebrity fascinates the general public as much as Sinead the singer. Whether that acute fascination justifies the extensive coverage this and other newspapers continue to afford the story is another question.
But people are interested and as dubious proof, her latest career move was discussed on Questions and Answers on Monday night with most of the panellists, relieved no doubt to be finished on the subject of judges or tribunals or war, resorting to flippant answers, exhibiting something close to delight that the most mixed up girl on Planet Pop was larking about again. Only one panellist seemed to find anything remotely cynical about the whole affair. Maureen Gaffney's tack was that it was all an attention-grabbing stunt by a highly intelligent woman who knows how to work the press. Anyone who looked closely at the carefully applied mascara in her priestly photographs, the earrings that matched her blue clerical garb, the presence of a tabloid reporter at the makeshift ceremony could come swiftly to the same conclusion.
If we are looking for motive though, Sinead would have us go much further back than 11 years ago when the golden-voiced south-sider first started selling records. Incidentally the very first interview published in this newspaper with the singer in 1988 began with the following sentence; "Being born on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Sinead O'Connor might well have been destined for the church".
Take it, or leave it, but according to Sinead when she was five years old she made a deal with God the way some people make pacts with the devil. If he would help her through a well-documented abusive childhood then when Sinead got bigger she would do whatever she could to spread His word, and make people turn to Him.
Her story continues, and again it can be taken with a biblical sack of salt, that she didn't want to become a nun and so she became a singer, the modern version of a priest. In her eyes Bob Marley is a priest. So is Bob Dylan. Even Van Morrison is afforded divine qualities. The way she tells it, everything in her life has been inexorably leading to this moment. She has been writing hymns, or as she calls them, hers, for all of her career. Nobody, least of all those who know her, she asserts, should be the least bit surprised.
The rest of us aren't that shocked either that she has metamorphosed into a Super Heroine, a collared crooning crusader, ready, Pow! to save, Bam!, the world, Biff!, from evil. It's just another in a long line of wacky outbursts or escapades. Its just slightly wackier, that's all. It started subtly. She shaved her head to be different. Wore docks and ballet skirts to challenge perceptions. Slagged off U2, at that time a rite of passage for any remotely successful Irish band or singer. Nothing too unremarkable yet, then.
Then fame, fame, fatal fame, took hold and occasionally she would pick up a political hot potato (the IRA, the famine, the state of the nation) and juggle with it till she got her fingers burnt. There was the full page ad she took out in this newspaper cataloguing the effect the abuse of her mother had on her. So much dirty family linen had rarely been washed in public. Her family was deeply and publicly wounded.
Later she wouldn't let the national anthem be played at a US concert. She regularly turns up in person to berate journalists who she feels have misrepresented her. She tears up a picture of the Pope. Then more recently the highly publicised custody battle for her daughter with journalist John Waters leaves her, she says herself, suicidal. Some weeks later she becomes a priest and apologises to "anyone who I have ever pissed off. If God has forgiven me then why can't they?".
She is an easy figure of fun, but because she has wished, indeed prayed, herself into this position, we deem her an uneasy figure for compassion. Michael Jackson sleeps in an oxygen tent. Sinead O'Connor thinks she is a priest.
But then she will tell you that everyone thought Jesus was crazy so this reaction is only to be expected. "And maybe it is crazy . . . But don't you think it is sad that people think I'm mad because I love God so much I wanted to marry him?" She wants an answer. You respond with what you hope is a noncommittal "mmmm . . ." You are sincerely hoping that her "ministry" brings joy and happiness to people, to her. (She has yet to say how she thinks her ordination and her planned move to Lourdes may impact on her two children.) And rapidly suffocating all of the hope is the thought that it can only end in tears.
After she very promptly returned a call from us on Thursday, talking for around 45 minutes, Sinead left two messages on the answer-phone. The first was about how she was setting up a healing centre in Lourdes with the donation that she had decided to retrieve from the bishop who had ordained her in Lourdes, where travellers from Ireland could visit for healing "or whatever". It was reminiscent of Princess Diana's famous phrase "battered this and battered that".
The second went like this. "Hello . . . this is Sinead, I mean Bernadette, look one thing that's really important to get across is that I have observed the press campaign organised by the Vatican against Bishop Comiskey when he rocked the status quo of the church . . . I'm not afraid of any of the ways the Vatican may wage wars against me . . . nothing can take my priesthood away even if I was to be killed and they would make a saint of me if they killed me . . .
She said she meant no harm, only good. She said that all of us will know this by the fruits of her work. She said . . . she said a lot of things and whether or not the words of this young woman, who admits she has been deeply depressed for much of her life, should be taken at face value, it seems the decent thing to hope that the seeds she is now sowing won't later leave a bitter taste in all our mouths.