Sinéad O’Connor knows exactly who she is

I was 16 years old in October 1992, when Sinéad O’Connor appeared on the stage of Saturday Night Live wearing a white lace gown reminiscent of the type Catholic girls wear at our first communions, sang Bob Marley’s “War” a capella, and then tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II while yelling, “Fight the real enemy,” leaving the audience in stunned silence. I was horrified. I also couldn’t help but feel the same kind of admiring awe I might feel for a classmate who yells the f-word during a school mass. Still, I’d always thought of the pope as a kindly Polish grandfather. I couldn’t imagine what he’d done to provoke such a response.

Watching the clip nearly 30 years later, knowing what I know about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and John Paul II’s complicity in protecting abusive clergy, I feel it should have been clear enough what O’Connor was protesting by the way she substituted “child abuse” and “children” in place of the original lyrics. But her rage was not just institutional, it was also personal. The photo she tore to pieces had hung on her dead mother’s bedroom wall. “It represented lies and liars and abuse,” she writes in her memoir, Rememberings, and the abuse she was protesting was, in large part, her own.

Rememberings builds toward that pivotal moment in her early career, so by the time we reach it, we know the horrors she experienced at the hands of her mentally ill mother, who often made her strip naked and then beat her with a broomstick. She also locked her in her room, left her home alone, and starved her. At age 14, O’Connor was sent to An Grianán, an Irish institution for troubled girls adjacent to the notorious Magdalene laundries for “fallen women,” where she taught herself to play guitar.