Remember kids, the church still continues to shuffle pedo priests and is still telling victims to eat shit. The Catholic Church is a corporation, and they only care about money and power, no matter how much their current PR pope spews hollow platitudes, without actually fixing anything.
Empty words from a fake "holy" leader who was elected by a board room of bankers and financiers.
Jeff Dunham even did a joke with Achmed the dead terrorist.
"I like to throw a penny between two Jews and watch them fight to the death. I also do the same with Catholic priests but instead I throw a small boy! The winner has to fight Michael Jackson!"
Somewhere in Rousseau's "Confessions" there's a bunch about him becoming disillusioned by the church as a child because of sexual abuse, and the head priest tells him "that's how it's always been". That was written in 1769!
A new priest has to replace another priest who recently retired. As he's taking confession, the woman on the other side says she sinned because she performed a blowjob. The priest had no idea of the correct penance for this. Just then a young acolyte passes so he leans out of his chair and asks the boy: "how much do they give around here for a blowjob?" The boy promptly answers: "One snicker bar, sir."
Yeah, that's the kinda stuff going around in the 80s.
Ripping up an image never makes anyone a bad person, religious figure or not.
Sure, I may prefer the tearing sound that images of Mohammed being ripped apart make... But that's just subjective personal preference. Doesn't mean people tearing up an image of the Virgin Mary are bad people. The important thing is neither does anything real to cause harm to anyone at all.
Just a reminder that she didn't actually explain why she was tearing up a picture of the Pope, she just pulled out a picture of him and tore it up without context. Nobody understood wtf was happening.
Yeah, there is a lot of revisionist history about this. This was well before the sex abuse story came out. The idea that that’s what she was protesting was lost on everyone.
John Paul II had an attempted assassination a decade before this (where he literally met with his attempted assassin to offer forgiveness), and was also leading efforts to apologize for past church participation in things like the holocaust, the slave trade, oppressing women, and even executing Galileo.
This is not to defend him. He absolutely ignored sex abuse and deserves hate, but when O’Connor did that, he was immensely popular. Tearing up his picture while singing Bob Marley’s War (a song about racism and inequality) was just a protest of which the purpose of which no viewer could figure out. She merely said “fight the real enemy” and didn’t reveal any additional reasoning until she sat for an interview a month later.
Late to this party, but I was in college and saw it happen when it aired. My reaction to it was, "Whoa!" though it didn't really hit me as anything more since I wasn't Catholic.
I did not see the aftermath coming. It was like she just instantly disappeared.
Thirty years later, she seems like the trailblazer for getting one's life ruined from retribution for daring to call out shitty behavior of powerful people and entities.
Around this time Nirvana drew a lot of attention for mocking Top of the Pops by miming hilariously badly to Smells like teen spirit on air. It was a more innocent time. Ripping up a pic of the pope was wild.
It's taken her dying for a lot of people to realise the absolute gem of a person she really was. RIP Sinead. We've lost 3 Irish musical gems this year.
Sophie the producer was so tired of hearing about terrible people that she got Magpie to make this show. It is really good. But it is still pretty depressing because the majority of cool people die horribly.
So.. You're still judging her harshly, despite finding out you were wrong (and decades behind everyone else, which takes some intentional avoidance of the topic, and clearly without taking in to consideration the impact people, well, like you, had on her mental health).