Sinéad O'Connor tearing up a photo of the Pope on SNL was both the peak and nadir of her career
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Sinéad O'Connor was a punk in reluctant pop star clothing when she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live on Oct. 3, 1992.
As she tore the picture once, twice, thrice, and threw the tattered pieces at the camera, so went her career. Two years earlier she had scored one of the biggest hits of 1990 with her definitive cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U," jettisoning her to a level of success she had neither expected or wanted.
After her appearance on SNL, she was brought plummeting back to earth amid a backlash that saw her publicly castigated for essentially speaking the truth. O'Connor was protesting child abuse committed and covered up by the Catholic Church in Ireland and now in the wake of her death Wednesday at age 56 we can fully realize the impact of that singular moment.
O'Connor became one of the most popular singers in the world quite by accident when "Nothing Compares 2 U" and its iconic music video dominated the charts and airwaves, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks and making the Irish chanteuse the first female artist to win Video of the Year at the MTV Music Video Awards.
But O'Connor was uncomfortable with fame and the feeling was pretty mutual. Outspoken and resolute in her beliefs, O'Connor chafed against the music industry's expectations of her. In 1991, when she was nominated for four Grammys for "Nothing Compares 2 U" and its album I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, she refused the nominations as well as the eventual award for Best Alternative Music Performance.
"As artists I believe our function is to express the feelings of the human race — to always speak the truth and never keep it hidden even though we are operating in a world which does not like the sound of the truth," the then-24-year-old wrote in a letter to the Recording Academy denouncing its emphasis on "material gain."
O'Connor followed up I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got with an album of jazz standards, Am I Not Your Girl? in 1992 and to promote it, she was booked on Saturday Night Live. The singer had previously pulled out of an SNL appearance over the episode's host, comedian Andrew Dice Clay, known for his homophobic and misogynist jokes as well as for being generally unfunny.
During rehearsals, O'Connor held up a photo of a Brazilian kid killed by police while singing an acapella version of Bob Marley's "War." During the live broadcast, she switched it up.
O'Connor had always planned to destroy that particular photo of JP II. It had belonged to her mother, with whom she had a fraught relationship, and when she died, O'Connor took the photo from her childhood home with the intention of tearing it up when the time felt right.
"And with that in mind, I carefully brought it everywhere I lived from that day forward," she wrote in her 2021 memoir Rememberings. "Because nobody ever gave a s--- about the children of Ireland."
The abuse of children had always been a impassioned cause for O'Connor, particularly with her own history of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her mother. Leading up to her appearance on SNL, she had been reading more and more about the Catholic Church's coverup of abuse in Ireland and had grown enraged.
On live TV, O'Connor sings the final lyrics of "War": "We know we will win / We have confidence in the victory / Of good over evil." On the word "evil," she pulls out the photo of the Pope and, looking directly into the camera, tears it asunder before proclaiming, "Fight the real enemy!"
Yvonne Hemsey/getty Sinéad O'Connor
The audience, save for one man audibly gasping, was stunned into silence. As O'Connor blew out the candles adorning the otherwise sparse stage, she couldn't have known what would follow in the weeks and years to come.
The backlash was swift and severe. She was banned for life from SNL, she became both pariah and punchline in the media, she was booed at a tribute show for her hero Bob Dylan, and even Queen of Controversy Madonna thought she had gone too far. Later that season on SNL, the Material Girl mocked O'Connor by tearing up a picture of Long Island mechanic Joey Buttafuoco, chanting her own, "Fight the real enemy!"
"The 10 years after that Saturday Night Live performance, the way that I was dealt with was shocking," O'Connor told EW in 2021. "It was the fashion to treat me bad, whether you were in my bed, at a board meeting, a TV show, a gig, or a party. Everybody treated me like I was a crazy bitch cos I ripped up the Pope's picture. We know I'm a crazy bitch, but that's not why."
However, in Rememberings, O'Connor reveals it was all worth it, even the backlash, as it was ultimately an act of self-liberation.
"A lot of people say or think that tearing up the Pope's photo derailed my career. That's not how I feel about it," she wrote. "I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track."
She added, "After SNL, I could just be me."
Nearly two decades after O'Connor's controversial stand, Pope Benedict formally apologized to victims of abuse carried out by Ireland's Catholic clergy.
In her final years, O'Connor had begun to reclaim her legacy, with the publication of Rememberings as well as last year's acclaimed documentary Nothing Compares. In an interview with the podcast Where Were You in '92?, director Kathryn Ferguson marveled at how time had vindicated O'Connor. During a screening of the doc in Ireland, at the SNL moment, the entire audience started to whoop and cheer.
"Everybody's just thinking, 'Why did we treat her the way that we did and how did we let this happen?' Everything that she was saying and doing was what needed to be heard," Ferguson said. "There was nobody really anywhere talking about it, it was all to come, five, ten years later. She was just so ahead of her time."
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