Sinéad O'Connor ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on SNL in 1992

Sinéad O'Connor 1966-2023

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She called out the shitty catholic church, got her career ruined for it, and 2 months later all the molestation stuff came out. Not once did she get an apology. RIP, Nothing truly did compare to you.

I was just a kid at the time but still remember the media making a huge villain out of Sinead. They made it seem like she was mentally unstable, but she was just years ahead of everyone else. I'm sad that she didn't get to see this outpouring of support and appreciation while she was alive. She died far too young, and I hope it wasn't by suicide. I hope she wasn't in pain.

Poor lass. I don't think it was very easy being her.
- Her 17 year old son committed suicide 18 months ago. I can't imagine how awful that would have been for her.

“It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” ~ Sinéad
- That appears to be a paraphrased notion from Jiddu Krishnamurti's works, quoted and attributed to him in The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity (1975) by Mark Vonnegut.
  
  Oh, I was not aware. Thank you for clarifying and providing the author's work.

Wild thing about this picture is that Wikipedia is basically the only permanent place it can be found. The post there says it's from Getty, with a link, but that link is now broken. SNL sure isn't letting this footage out. From the WP article: all the rebroadcasts of that episode use footage from the rehearsals, where she held up a different picture and didn't tear it up.
- Fucking cowards

30 years later and people even on Reddit and Lemmy, fall for the Catholic Church's bullshit and their pr pope "he's so progressive this pope" they say, as if the current Pope was any better. He's also a pedophile defender who refuses to meet with the victims of his clergy.

I never understood how upset people got over a piece of paper being ripped up. It makes no sense to me
- because they didn't want to see/know the truth

Just read about all this today in her obit, wow. What a complicated person. I love that she was proud till the end of her act, considered it a success, and told us all that people who get abused as children are gonna be fucked up for life like she was. Hr own son committed suicide. So much pain and sadness, but I think I want to get a poster of her as a reminder of this.

Nothing ever did compare to her

I knew in 1992 she was badass for this. The more backlash she got the more I was convinced she was right.

RIP, you brave beautiful punk soul.

The video of Kris Kristofferson comforting her is amazing. Really made me love him even more.

This is a borderline rule 7, but for now I will leave it up. Play nice, be critical of an organization without getting this post closed.
Rest easy, Sinéad.

I remember seeing in the video for Nothing Compares 2 U on Rage (ABC) and just being floored by the intensity and honesty in her eyes. RIP Ms. O'Connor you were truly something.
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Rest in power you beautiful soul

redacted

Context?
- Of the picture? Or why it’s being posted about today?
  Re: the picture - she was the musical guest (or host? Can’t remember) on SNL, and the protested/called out the pedophilia/abuse happening in the Catholic Church by ripping up a picture of the Pope on live TV. People got pisssssed and she got absolutely destroyed in the public eye. Turns out she was right. But it was never publicly addressed nor was she redeemed in any way in the public eye.
  Re: why posted today - she died today. And is considered heroic for the above mentioned action so I would imagine OP was memorializing that moment on this the day of her death.
  
  She led a sad life, after years of battling mental illness, she had lost custody of her son which sent her into a spiral and her son died last year from suicide, which turned her into a suicidal wreck. Her cause of death hasn't been announced but I'm assuming she took her own life
- It's interesting that you ask that because that was the problem with her doing it in the first place- most people weren't yet aware of the depth of pedophilia scandals the Catholic church was embroiled in, so they just thought she was anti-Catholic. We should have known what she meant when she said, "fight the real enemy," but the news was just not that prominent, not in the U.S. anyway.
  Please don't get me wrong, though. She absolutely did not deserve to have her life and career totally fucked because people didn't understand her message.
  
  Most Catholics in the US were keenly aware of the abuse issues, it's just that they didn't talk about it openly, and the media was loathe to cover it for fear of being labeled anti-Catholic, as she was.
  Source: My mother was a Catholic nun for 15 years before leaving the convent to marry my dad, also a devout Catholic. I was an altar boy, went to Catholic schools through High School, and grew up in the 80's and 90's. It was well known among the church and school communities which priests to steer clear of and why.
- She ripped up a picture of the pope live on SNL, while performing one of her songs. It was a protest against all the child rape that the church has hidden. She basically got publicly destroyed for it. She became a pariah, and her career was ruined. It’s worth noting that she was Irish, and Ireland is mainly catholic.
  Then a few months later, all the stories of the catholic rapes broke. All the kids (and former-kids-now-adults) started coming forward to say they had been molested by church leaders and the church had covered it up. People started coming forward with decades of stories. It was suddenly too much for the church to cover up. It was a big scandal.
  But the damage to her career was already done, and she never got any kind of redemption. She basically went from being an A-list musician on the level of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, to being completely unemployable overnight. And she never recovered from it even after everything she was protesting about was proven true. She died today.
- Performing Bob Marley and the Whalers' song, War. Haunting performance, libs on here would call her a tankie for this song lol https://youtu.be/X0VpfiMcPPA
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/X0VpfiMcPPA
  https://piped.video/X0VpfiMcPPA
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

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